


we're only the past

by futuredescending



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Civilian!Harry, Kingsman!Eggsy, M/M, Slow Burn, alternative universe, honeypot mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-28 12:21:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7639960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m Eggsy,” the stranger says, holding out his hand. It’s a very fine one. Small, with elegant bones and long fingers. He wears a gold signet ring on the smallest one.</p><p>It’s obviously a nickname, designed to undoubtedly invite more questions, pull in more interest. Harry can’t say he isn’t baited, but.</p><p>“And I’m working,” he says, ignoring the hand and Eggsy both as he resumes his guard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I do more than just honeypot fics.
> 
> This one came to life via a lovely prompt by [thisbirdhadflown](http://thisbirdhadflown.tumblr.com) who proposed Harry being the civilian target and Eggsy as the Kingsman agent who came to seduce him. I didn't want to retread previous material, but the idea of exploring an AU!Harry was too tempting, so welcome to the psychological disaster of one Harry Hart, not-a-Kingsman.

For the fifth time that evening, Harry finds himself with an armful of very uncoordinated and very intoxicated socialite in Soho.

“Careful, Margaret,” he says pointlessly, because it’s not like she’s listening through the chorus of her friends’ hysterical laughter.

“Oh god, oh god,” Margaret gasps through her own laughter, doing an ineffectual job of getting her feet back under her own volition. “I’m so sorry, Haz. It’s these bloody shoes! Can’t I just take them off? Will you carry me if I do? The pavement’s all gross.”

“Ooooh, make him carry you. It’s his job, innit?” her friend Imogen says.

Harry sighs. “It’s Harry, Margaret,” he reminds her for the thousandth time since he’d been put on her detail. “And I’m your security, not your horse.”

“But the real question,” Elisabeth, the second best mate of his charge, chimes in, “Is whether you’re hung as?”

It sets off another round of guffawing and Margaret flapping her hands at them in a desperate attempt to shut them up. “Now I’m going to imagine it all the time!” she cries out, which only makes everyone laugh harder, and Harry still has to keep a firm grip on her waist as she nearly topples over again.  


Almost thirty years in the British Army, fifteen of which were in Special Forces, and this is now his life: glorified minder to a 26-year-old heiress who is a stone’s throw from the British throne.

It could be worse, he supposes. He could have bowed down to his godfather’s insistence he join that bloody tailor shop all those years ago.

But going on the fourth hour of what promises to still be a very long night out on the town, he can’t help but wonder what his life would have been like had it all gone differently.

If he hadn’t caught that bullet that ultimately ended his career and stolen his left eye.

If he had left the army after his first tour to continue practising medicine in London instead.

Hell, if he had become a bloody tailor after all and led a quiet and dignified life, coming home to three fat cats and another bottle of cheap whisky.

“Haz, hail us a cab, will you?” Margaret asks as she clumsily attempts to light her cigarette. After five flicks of the lighter, the flame finally takes.

And Harry does, because that’s his job.

They are off to another noisy club, and Harry makes sure the girls don’t have to wait in the queue, are safely ensconced in the VIP section, and that the staff are also bringing them many glasses of water between bottles.

He waits a discreet distance away, close enough to intervene should any trouble arise, far enough away to give them an illusion of privacy, to fade into the background, to be another fixture, much like the lounge upon which they sit or the table that is covered in their swiftly emptied glasses.

“You seem terribly bored.”

When Harry turns, he finds himself starting at the profile of a young man who somehow slipped up to him without him even noticing, and that fact alone irks him. By habit, he assesses the stranger: young, Margaret’s age, athletic, very well-dressed, impeccable breeding, and—when he finally turns to look at Harry— _stunning_.

Thick rimmed glasses that do not mask blue green eyes. Teardrop shaped. Sharp jaw. Scarred left eyebrow. High cheekbones.  


It’s enough to throw up an aberration in the usual pattern of Harry’s thoughts, pulls him up short and makes him take notice in a way he thought he has been long since inured to.

Harry has been surrounded by so much beauty, the best that money can buy, that he’s forgotten what it’s like to be surprised.

“This club,” the stranger continues speaking, nodding to the whole smoky, seizure-inducing interior, “doesn’t seem to be your usual watering hole.”

“I’m working,” Harry says, tearing his gaze away and standing up just a little bit straighter.

“Let me guess,” the young man says, nodding to the girls, “in charge of them?”

“Not very difficult to figure out.” Really, he shouldn’t continue carrying on like this, humouring this handsome stranger, being distracted. “They’ll love you, but as soon as they want you to leave, you had better.”

“What if I’m not here for them?”

Harry’s about to ask him what he could possible want then, but there’s something in the stranger’s eyes when he glances at him again. Meaningful. Insistent. Heated.

Suddenly Harry feels like he’s been pinned to the wall.

His heart beats just a little faster. His cheeks heat up. An old, barely remembered sensation begins to stir low in his stomach.

“I’m Eggsy,” the stranger says, holding out his hand. It’s a very fine one. Small, but with elegant bones and long fingers. He wears a gold signet ring on the smallest one.

It’s obviously a nickname, designed to undoubtedly invite more questions, pull in more interest. Harry can’t say he isn’t baited, but.

“And I’m working,” he says, ignoring the hand and Eggsy both as he resumes his guard.

He can feel the way Eggsy stares at him, not with disbelief or anger. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry can see the corners of his wide mouth impishly turn up just a little, and his eyes seem to gleam brighter.

“Well Mr I’m Working.” He feels the way Eggsy steps in closer until his body is brushing against Harry’s forearm, causing him to involuntarily tense. “For when you’re not working.”

Fingers brush his chest. Harry can still feel the ghost of them long after Eggsy drops his hand down by his side and steps back again.

Harry glances down and sees the white edge of a business card peeking out from his front pocket. He pulls it out and sees a mobile number hastily scribbled on the blank side.

When he turns it over, he immediately recognises the logo.

 _Gary “Eggsy” Unwin_  
_Associate_  
_Kingsman_  
_11 Savile Row_  
_London W1S 3PS_  
_United Kingdom_  


His godfather’s tailor shop.

When Harry glances up, though, Eggsy is nowhere to be seen, having disappeared as quietly as he had arrived.

 

_____

 

He is a silent sentinel, trailing silently after them as Margaret leads her friends onto the dance floor. He remains at the edges, in the shadows, trying to track their faces as they swim in and out of the streaking lights and writhing throngs.  


He can feel the card in his pocket like it has a mass greater than what it actually is. Its sharp corners dig into his skin through the layers of his suit if he rolls his shoulders or breathes in deeply. It feels like an albatross, but Harry’s mother told him he’s always been prone to drama, and it’s one of the few things she didn’t get wrong about him.

The girls attract attention. Of course they do. They are all pretty young things and their exuberance, however chemically manufactured, gives them a fresh sheen that feels at once incandescent and ethereal.

It draws a group of boys who slowly start to insert themselves into the scene. They are similar in age and pedigree to Eggsy, but lacking in his decorum as they are equally as inebriated and far less gracious, lust stamped into their glazed eyes and dull faces. Harry watches the interactions, the way the girls allow them brief access to dance with for a time until their hands predictably become proprietary, resulting in loud, angry protests.

Then he steps in.

He grabs one of the boy’s wandering hands by the wrist and twists his arm back in a direction it does not want to go, hovering at the tipping point of breaking. The boy in his arms yelps and Harry leans in to speak directly into his ear beneath the loud thumping music. “Let’s not make a scene. You and your friends will leave. It can either be quietly to your transport or loudly to A&E. Your choice.”

The boy still has a few working brain cells unmarinated by drink, middling whisky by the smell of it. When Harry lets him go, he staggers away and drags most of his friends with him, all but one.

That one, the second largest of the group maybe, throws his chest forward at Harry, shoulders back, heavy brow furrowed, and jaw set in challenge. “What’s it to you, grandpa? What are you, some sort of pirate? Did someone else beat your arse and get you good in the eye? Come on, I’ll take the other one then!”

The dance floor instinctively parts for them. People have stopped dancing to stare. Harry hates making scenes, but his deeply entrenched wilfulness has meant he often finds himself dragged into the centre of them anyway. With little other choice, Harry waits until the boy comes in at him with a clumsy swing, neatly sidesteps that wild arm and jabs a fist sharply into his left eye for some poetic justice. The boy stumbles back, grabbing his head and moaning. Harry may have admittedly used enough force to cause an orbital fracture, but the eye itself should be okay.

By now the club’s bouncers approach and drag the whingeing boy away to his friends, only giving Harry the nod. They know his face well, after all, and appreciate how he does not escalate situations if he can help it.

“Haz!” Margaret cries out. “Haz, you lovely, lovely genius! My knight in shining armour! Haz!”

Once again, he finds his arms full of Margaret when she throws herself at him, this time though in a fierce embrace.

 

_____

 

It’s going on very early morning when the more ambitious types start to wake up to go for a run or walk their dogs. Harry has the cab drop off each of the girls at their respective homes and waits until they stumble through the door before directing the driver to move on.

Margaret is now slumped against him, fast asleep and using Harry’s suit jacket as a makeshift blanket. She’s not so bad, Harry thinks as he keeps an arm around around her to keep her from faceplanting into the backs of the front seats every time the driver rounds a corner. Young, yes, spoiled, most definitely, but genuinely good-hearted and even quite kind despite being unhappy in the way children with too much money in lieu of parental affection often are.

He does end up carrying her up to the flat her father had paid for, tucking her into her bed, removing the stilt-like monstrosities strapped to her feet that are her stiletto heels, plugging in her mobile to charge, and making sure water and aspirin are within easy reach for when she wakes up. None of these things are technically within his purview, but he can’t help but view her protectively, wanting her to continue having a charmed and carefree life, though he knows it’s not so easy as that.

He can still get a good six hours of sleep in before he should be back at his post, ready for when his charge wakes up in undoubtedly ill humour. Only when he returns to his modest little flat across the city, he instead pours himself a drink and sits out on the fire escape to watch the first streaks of morning suffuse the sky.

Once more, he takes out the business card that keeps surfacing to the forefront of his thoughts. The handwritten digits are cramped and slightly slanted, indicating a sense of impatience that seems to belie the confident and carefree demeanour Eggsy had presented. It’s another source of intrigue, but then again, Harry doesn’t lead a very thrilling life these days and perhaps he’s all too readily latching onto whatever scrap of excitement falls his way.

On a whim, he pulls out his phone and dials the number, fully expecting the call to go to voicemail, but is instead surprised by Eggsy’s very present live answer. “Hello, this is Eggsy speaking.”

“You’re either up very early or you never went to bed,” Harry says.

There is a slight pause as Eggsy attempts to place the voice. To his credit, it’s not more than a beat, barely noticeable had Harry not been looking for it. “Would you like to give me your name now, or shall I simply go with ‘Mr Off the Clock’?”

He hesitates. His own sense of inner reason is catching up with him, but it hasn’t taken full control yet. His most foolish endeavours have always taken place in the first rays of dawn. “Harry Hart.”

“A pleasure to have met you, Harry Hart,” Eggsy says. “A pleasure to talk to you now.”

“So, which is it?”

“Which is what?”

“Early morning or very late night?”

Eggsy laughs softly, warm in Harry’s ear. “The latter. I’m something of an insomniac. You as well, I take it.”

Harry clears his throat and studies the way the sunlight streaks through the amber liquid in his glass, caramelising it. “I should try and get some sleep. I’m on shift again soon.”

“Not that I’m not glad you called, Harry, but why did you? I honestly thought there would be at least a few more days of hand wringing first.”

He would have done just that, but the mystery had been too compelling and he was just tired enough to let his guard down. “Did my godfather send you?”

“Your godfather?” He can tell he’s taken Eggsy off-guard with that one. “Who’s that then?”

“Chester King.”

“Ah.” It’s a sound of realisation. “What a small world we live in.”

“London especially, it seems.”

“I can assure you, Harry, that my approaching you had nothing to do with Mr King. In fact, I can attest that he absolutely loathes me and probably would have had me sacked a long time ago had I not been so good at my job.”

It’s an odd statement. Eggsy seems to be the sort of promising young gentleman his godfather would appreciate. “Why _did_ you approach me?” Eggsy could have had anyone in that club with one of his sly smiles, his charges included. It’s perhaps the most vexing question of all.

“I like a man with an eyepatch. Very Nick Fury.”

His ignorance as to who that is certainly highlights one of the many gulfs of disparity that lie between them. “I have little time for games.”

He hears Eggsy sigh. “You’re terrible at flirting, you know. But if you insist on the truth, it’s because you looked interesting. And out of place. Maybe one begat the other. I like interesting. I like how you looked at me with equal interest while your mouth dismissed me not more than five seconds later.” 

He’s not sure if he can let himself fully believe Eggsy, but he also knows he’s always been too suspicious for his own good. It isn’t difficult to imagine Eggsy as someone to whom many things, opportunities, and people come easily and with little challenge, and something within him balks at the the notion that he should provide him with the entertainment he so apparently desires.

And yet.

Harry is an old fool, frequently and always regrettably, despite how often he tries to purge these weaknesses from himself. The fact that he has been made the subject of interest, however questionable, by a beautiful creature nevertheless appeals to his damnable vanity.

It’s troubling. When it comes to himself, he doesn’t want to examine it too closely.

Thus he ignores the thread of conversation entirely, wetting his throat with the burn of scotch that sits bitterly in his stomach and changing tracks. “So you’re a tailor. What a curious profession for a young man. Chester constantly hounded me about joining him when I was younger, but honestly, just the prospect bored me to tears.”

“What can I say? I love the way a well-made suit looks on a man. You wear one well.”

He looks down at his now wrinkled clothing that will need to be sent off to the cleaners before they can be worn again. “I can assure you mine is at a price point a few decimal places fewer than what I know your shop deals in.”

“It didn’t look off the rack.”

Harry almost wants to ask how long Eggsy spent studying him without his knowledge. “Not all of my godfather’s words went in one ear and out the other. I have some skill with a sewing machine.” And plenty of hands-on practise in suturing up gaping flesh wounds in the middle of the Arabian Desert.

“Fascinating.” Eggsy sounds like he means it. “You’re a man of modest means and yet a great deal of investment in presentation.”

“You of all people should know one must keep up appearances among our set.”

“Which makes me wonder why you’re working as a bodyguard when, by all accounts, it sounds as if you ought to be living as lavishly as the ones you watch over.”

“I was disowned when I was twenty one,” Harry finds himself confessing, unsure of why he would tell a stranger so much when he hasn’t breathed a word about it with anyone who didn’t already know. “Cut out of the will and access to my trust fund taken away.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. You don’t have to explain why.”

“Which is your way of asking without being rude.”

“Naturally.” The way Eggsy says it, Harry knows he’s grinning unrepentantly, imagines it, white teeth, squinting eyes, and wide pink mouth.

“Officially? I was disowned for being a sodomite. You can tell how long ago this was by the antiquated terminology. Unofficially?” Harry swirls the contents of his glass, sloshing the liquid inside so forcefully that some of it spills over onto his hand. “My godfather was trying to force my hand. He encouraged my parents to cut me off as a way to bring me into line. Instead, I ran off to join the army and made my own way in the world.”

“And now you’re a bodyguard.”

How the mighty still fall in the end. “And now I am that.”

“Did you lose your eye in the army?”

“Yes, among other things.”

“What happened?”

“That’s not something that ought to be discussed at such a godforsaken hour,” Harry says. “And especially after how much information you’ve managed to glean from me without giving anything of yourself in return.”

Eggsy huffs in amusement. “It’s a ploy to get you to agree to go out to dinner with me. I’ll tell you anything you want to know then.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

It gives him pause. His throat becomes dry and he has to take another bracing swallow. _Christ._ “I have records in my collection that are older than you.”

“So?”

It’s not as if he hadn’t been aware that Eggsy was drastically younger than him, but hearing it quantified erases any shred of illusion he could have hoped to enshroud himself with.

“So I managed to survive my mid-life crisis with most of my dignity intact. I’d rather not revisit those dark days.”

“And yet you called me.”

“I needed to know if—”

“Yes, yes. Chester, et al. But you still didn’t have to call.”

Harry turns away from his view of his South Hampstead neighbourhood and climbs back into his flat which is, at best, lacklustre. There is the bare minimum of furnishings to designate each allotted portion of the flat: two chairs for the sitting room, a small foldable table for the dining room, a twin sized bed shoved up against the far wall for the bedroom and beside it a cheap wardrobe that houses all his carefully self-tailored suits. It somehow manages to achieve cluttered and stark at the same time. Too many of his belongings still sit in mouldering boxes that haven’t been opened since the day he first hastily stuffed whatever he could frantically grab into them as he fled his family’s home.

He’s been living in boxes ever since.

Something, at last, gives. “No, I didn’t have to call.”

“When are you next free?”

“Sunday. The family is all together then and my presence won’t be required in a house crawling with security.”

“Can I see you?”

Logically, he knows he should say no and end this brief departure from sanity. Eggsy is too young and too insistent and he’s too old, too scarred, and too worn down. 

His eye aches, or rather, the socket in which his eye would have once existed. He has a fake one somewhere among his things, but there’s so much scarring around the area itself that it’s more conducive to simply use a patch to cover the worst of the damage.

Logically, he knows what he should do. As a rule, Harry tries to abide by a very sensible existence.

But for once, just this once, in a moment of weakness, surely, he wants to be wanted.

“We’ll see,” he compromises. “I’ll call you if so.”

“Alright. Call if interested; don’t call, and I’ll never bother you again,” Eggsy easily agrees. “But for the record, I really do hope you call, Harry.”

“Go to bed, Eggsy.”

“Only if you do the same. That girl looks like she’s trouble.”

“Not half as much as you, I’d wager.”

Eggsy’s cheerful laughter is the last thing he hears before he hangs up.

 

_____

 

Through the next few days, it weighs on his mind with all the gravity that ought to be reserved for a major life decision. Harry feels appropriately foolish, but then, he hasn’t entertained the notion of a romantic entanglement—be it for a few moments, an entire night, or something more—in years.  


Margaret seems subdued lately. Harry tries not to overhear her conversations with her father, but they have grown in frequency and decibel. Vaguely, Harry assumes their arguments to stem from the spate of disappearances of all manner of notable persons. Just last week, Margaret’s former schoolmate had disappeared along with her entire family. This morning, Margaret’s former university professor had been reported missing.

She is usually not inclined to spend so much time alone in her flat, but lately she has begun to do just that, leaving Harry with even less to do but sit in the hall and wait for such a time that she may require him.

It gives him even more time to think.

Harry has never been the sort to ebulliently embrace his homosexuality. By the time he had discovered that he preferred the company his own gender, it had only barely just been decriminalised in the eyes of the English legal system and certainly not in those of society. Homosexual congress was to be, by and large, performed furtively and always with a great sense of shame. Anything that dared to emulate a longer term relationship was simply not done.

He had his brief liaisons at public school and then later in back alleys and toilet stalls within the sorts of ignominious establishments that people only ever referred to indirectly. The army had been both better and worse because some relationships grew beyond mutual physical gratification. Emotional attachments were forged in the heat of battle, consummated under the shadow of mortality, and denied or outright rebuffed in the broad light of day and the return to safety. Harry had got his heart broken many a time that way, back when he hadn’t known better.

The worst of it came, however, not from rejection but the permanent finality of death. Witnessing the man he loved and who loved him back bleed out beneath his desperate, useless hands, whispering false words of hope and comfort as the light faded from his eyes.

No, Harry does not want to love like that again, even if it means lifelong loneliness and unfulfilled longing.

In some ways, the grievous injuries that ended his military career also helped to fortify his own barricades. There are few men who would look twice at him now and thus there are few men he can be tempted by. The scope of his life has neatly narrowed down to the goal of getting himself and Margaret safely through the next hour of each day, and in her cossetted world of shopping trips, night time clubbing, and the occasional garden party, Harry could allow the tedium to numb his existence.

Until Eggsy.

He doesn’t understand how Eggsy had got under his skin so quickly, and with all the furious rancour of poison ivy. Eggsy is beautiful, true, but so are hundreds of other young men, and there Harry has managed to keep his attentions limited to brief appreciative glances at most.

Is it because Eggsy made the initial gesture, showed himself to be neither unfased nor put off by Harry’s natural reservations? He would never have cast himself in the role of the pursued before, but there’s something about the entire structure of it he finds reluctantly appealing. Come to think, the narrative is rather cinematically romantic, and Harry loves classic films more than many things in life because the script is familiar and the ending is a foregone conclusion: happily ever after, usually, but there are a fair few that are bittersweet and even melancholy. Those are his most favourite of all, luring him in with their kernels of truth.

His circular ponderings bring him all the way to the beginning of the end of the week, and on Sunday he wakes up and changes the sheets, fixes himself a cup of coffee and two slices of dry toast, uses his laptop to check his email as the morning news drones on in the background about the latest entrepreneur who thinks he’s the next world saviour, and warily eyes his phone.

True to his word, Eggsy hasn’t called or texted since their conversation, and Harry likes that. It gives him room to breathe, to reassemble his sense of control over a tenuous situation. But it also brings unequivocal reality home to roost.

If he calls, it’s on him. He is committed to the action.

If he doesn’t, he will go to bed, return to Margaret tomorrow and sit in the hall outside her flat, plagued by reawakened, unsated urges and missed opportunities of not only the past few days but an entire lifetime.

In all honesty, there’s comfort in self-pity that he would normally not mind wallowing in, but today, this morning, he feels more restless than usual. Perhaps it is the result of a week’s worth of even greater inaction, but for once, he would very much like a change.

At 9.07 in the morning, he picks up his mobile and dials Eggsy’s number.

It rings precisely twice before Eggsy picks up. “Thank you for calling, Harry.”

“I don’t want dinner,” Harry says, heart pounding in his chest. “I just want you to come over.”

Eggsy doesn’t waste his breath to ask any questions save but one. “When?”

“Now. I’ll text you the address,” he says before promptly hanging up.

It takes him five minutes to realise he isn’t prepared for what he’s set out to do, and he could kick himself, he really could. A last minute search through his topmost boxes reveals nothing useful. His medicine cabinet is woefully sparse.

He’s wondering if he has time to make a quick trip to the shop down the road when Eggsy knocks on his door. He presents a smug picture, leaning against the frame when Harry opens it, and Harry feels gutted by his presence once again.

Eggsy wears another bespoke suit, this one dark grey, and there’s a faint, mostly healed cut on his cheek. His bright existence feels like it is both tangible and ephemeral. It reminds him of the delicate butterflies he chased after as a child, entranced by their fluttering beauty, desiring only to have some of it for himself. Only instead he learned what fragile beings they truly were beneath his clumsy hands, and that to seek to possess often meant destroying the very thing you loved.

So Harry is drawn to Eggsy and yet still hesitates, feeling ungainly and destructive. Wanting and fearful.

Finally it is Eggsy who takes the decision from him by stepping past him into his flat. He watches Eggsy take in his surroundings, trying to glean who Harry is by that with which he surrounds himself. He imagines there are many blank gaps in those conclusions, maybe wrong ones entirely, and even feels just a little bit pleased about it.

Harry quietly shuts the door, sealing them in and drawing a line in the sand. He turns back to meet Eggsy’s expectant gaze. They both know why they are here. Small talk seems ridiculous. They are past the point of no return and yet Harry doesn’t know how to move from point A to point B.

“What do you want?” Eggsy prompts.

It’s a question that sparks a thousand answers that all hit him at once and he cannot find the discipline to verbalise a single one of them.

He only wants and wants without reason or boundary.

In the end, a shape of a thought emerges from the subconscious morass: he wants to be economical. To the point even. “I want you to take off your clothes.”

A flashpoint of heat flares across Eggsy’s pretty, tired eyes. His lips part just slightly, just enough, in both surprise, maybe by the bluntness of the request, and desire, because if there was ever a shred of doubt left as to what this was, Harry’s just removed it.

He didn’t question Harry’s change of plans before. He doesn’t question him now, eyes never leaving Harry’s as he raises a hand to slowly loosen the silk green tie knotted at his throat.

“Stop,” Harry says, and something darkly possessive within him rears its head and takes notice when Eggsy immediately obeys.

Harry steps forward, closing the distance between them. It forces Eggsy to tilt his head up in order or maintain their locked gazes, exposing the pale column of his throat. His hands nudge Eggsy’s away in order to do the task themselves, pulling one end of the tie free from the neat Windsor knot and then dragging the strip of fabric out from around Eggsy’s neck.

When he lets the tie fall to the floor between their feet, Eggsy surges forward, reaching up to cup his face and draw Harry’s mouth to his. The first touch of their lips is warm and always so shockingly soft even if Eggsy kisses him with hungry insistence. It should just be a simple press of sensitive skin to sensitive skin, but he can’t help feeling like Eggsy’s just struck a match and dropped it in dry brush, and it’s all Harry can do to pull Eggsy against him to keep from being wholly consumed right there and then.

Eggsy breathes out through his nose, makes a soft sigh into Harry’s mouth, and opens his wider to touch his tongue to Harry’s. He tastes like a good scotch made sweeter by the illicit hour, and Harry spends a long, long time delving into him like that, one hand cupped against the back of Eggsy’s neck, lips sliding along his, tongues entwined.

When he at last breaks off to pull back just slightly, Eggsy is a portrait of ravishment, lips red and swollen, cheeks flushed, and the pupils of his eyes blown wide. Harry reaches up to peel the glasses from his face, wanting to see that face unadorned, and is taken aback by how much more shockingly vulnerable Eggsy seems without them.

More shaken up than he had thought he could be, he steps back and carefully places the glasses atop a tall stack of boxes and then says, “Continue.”

Eggsy is meticulous. He works from top to bottom. His fingers easily thumb the buttons of his suit jacket, then the cufflinks, before he shrugs it off in one fluid move of his broad shoulders. His dress shirt is pulled out from the waist of his trousers and unbuttoned but left on. His belt is unbuckled. The button and zip of his trousers are undone but still cling to his narrow hips. His oxfords, and then his dress socks, are slipped off each foot using the nimble toes of the other, one at a time, and kicked aside.

He stands before Harry, only half unwrapped, and impudently says, “Finish for me.”

It’s a lure and challenge both. In the fantastical part of his mind that has been imagining hundreds of scenarios of what he could do with such a canvas, Harry thinks he ought to inflict punishment for such cheek, but most of him is too caught up in the tantalising image Eggsy makes, only wanting reverence most of all.

When Harry goes to him, he nearly tears the shirt from Eggsy’s shoulders, exposing a divinely carved body, pale smooth skin, and a light smattering of hair. It’s not the body one would expect of a mere tailor but neither is it a body solely carved from the gym. There’s a honed wiriness inherent in every sinew and thread of muscle. Some points of fading discolouration of almost vanished bruises. Later he might devote more thought to the inconsistency, but now he is only appreciative, drunk with desire and aching to touch. 

Eggsy tilts his head to give Harry’s mouth access to his throat, shivers when Harry bites lightly at his collarbone and then sharply inhales when Harry sinks to his knees before him. He mouths at the straining fabric of Eggsy’s groin before pressing his nose in to breathe in deep.

“ _Harry_.” Eggsy’s exhalation is shaky. A fine tremour travels down his body, which Harry feels against his lips.

More for his own sake than out of any desire for mercy, he tugs down Eggsy’s trousers and boxers both, freeing his rigid cock that curves out from a thatch of dark hair, precome beading from the tip. It’s a good length and girth that Harry can’t help but wrap his fingers around it to give it a few firm strokes as if to test the warm solid length in his hand before taking it into his mouth.

Eggsy’s groan gets caught between his teeth as his knees shake. His hands automatically rise to cup the back of Harry’s head, threading through his hair as his hips make unconscious abortive thrusts. Harry encourages it by gripping Eggsy’s hips and coaxing him to fuck into his mouth, which Eggsy does only slowly, savouring every glide across the flat of Harry’s tongue scraping against the underside of his cock, until he hits the back of Harry’s throat.

“Harry, god. Your mouth,” Eggsy gasps.

He’s missed the feel of a cock in it, all smooth flesh, musk, and salt. He’s missed the way it almost chokes him, the saliva pooling at the back of his throat, and hands that tighten in his hair. He’s missed the breathy grunts and wordless cries of his partner that he can feel all the way down to his bones, the high-pitched whines whenever he swallows around the blunt head and lets it grind against his soft palate until his throat will be sore and hoarse.

“I can’t, Harry. I’m gonna—” Eggsy’s slow, rhythmic movements gradually become stilted in his effort to restrain himself from moving faster, the way he tries to hold back only to shove forward too hard and then pull back just as sharply, so Harry just sucks harder, forces his hips to thrust forward too fast, bobbing his head up and down Eggsy’s cock until Eggsy’s fingers dig into his scalp with a cry and bitter semen floods his mouth.

He only pulls off when Eggsy has begun to soften in his mouth, standing up and moving to the galley kitchen to spit in the sink. And while he may immensely enjoy giving head, he’s not overly fond of the taste of the result, so he pours himself a glass of scotch to scourge the last of it away.

By the time he’s returned, Eggsy has stepped out of the pile of clothes and stands in the middle of his flat, gloriously naked and not an ounce self-conscious. There’s a beautiful flush across his body and a fair number of moles. His skin shines with perspiration. Harry wants to bite into the generous flesh of his inner thighs.

“Would you like to fuck me?” Eggsy asks like he’s asking if Harry would care for some milk in his tea.

“I’m afraid I haven’t got anything. Didn’t quite think this one through,” he admits, and then, because it’s obvious, “It’s been awhile.”

“Well, your mouth sure isn’t rusty.” Eggsy turns and bends down to dig through the pockets of his trousers, giving Harry a perfect view of his supple arse, and when he straightens, he’s holding up two condoms and a small foil packet of lubricant. “I brought supplies.”

It’s how he ends up on the edge of his bed, stripped out of his own clothes, Eggsy sitting in his lap, one hand reaching behind him to brace Harry’s cock as he slowly sinks down onto it. The slow breach into heat and tightness is maddening. He grips the flesh of Eggsy’s arse hard enough to leave lasting marks as Eggsy breathes harshly through his mouth, pain tightening the skin around his eyes.

“Alright?” he asks him, relinquishing a hand to smooth over Eggsy’s lower back and up his spine even as his teeth worry a new bruise into his neck.

“Yeah. Just.” He sinks down another inch and rises back up just as painstakingly before lowering himself back down again, forcing himself to take in more. “Been awhile for me too.”

After that, it’s silent in the flat but for their heavy breaths of exertion and the creak of the mattress as Eggsy starts to ride his cock. He’s a gorgeous vision in motion with all his muscles flexing and clenching, hair sweat darkened and sticking to his forehead, his cock already hard again and slapping against his quivering flat stomach. Harry matches his pace, fucking up into him every time Eggsy drops down, forcing his cock up into him as deeply as he can go.

“You feel so good,” Eggsy whispers, like he doesn’t want any sound to be louder than the filthy noises of their fucking. “I wish we could fuck like this forever.”

“That might become painful,” Harry grunts out, and then they both break out into breathless laughter.

“Fuck, I’m gonna feel this tomorrow.” But he doesn’t stop, possibly couldn’t, driven on by the insistent heat and pressure pooling in his groin.

Without warning, Harry rises and flips their positions, sending Eggsy crashing to the bed, slipping out of him in the process. Before Eggsy can protest, he rolls him onto his side and then slots himself back between his legs, pinning Eggsy’s ankle over his shoulder as he lines himself back up against Eggsy’s hole and pushes back in.

Eggsy’s moans are muffled into the crook of his arm as Harry grinds against his prostate. He doesn’t have much leverage to move, but he can reach down to stroke himself into a second intense climax, spilling across Harry’s sheets.

Harry’s thrusts speed up, and all Eggsy can do now is take it, palms burrowing into the mattress, trying to keep from being driven clear across the narrow space. “Come on,” he urges. “Harder! Come in me.”

With a few more asynchronous thrusts, and Harry obliges.

For a a few precious moments, he feels ripped from his body, washed away on a tidal wave of euphoria and connection, the everyday mundane briefly wiped clean from existence.

The return back into his body is like a controlled series of drops, reality and discomfort gradually rising to the surface of his awareness. He’s desperately thirsty. His hips and legs burn with a sort of physical exertion he isn’t used to. These are minor things, though, paling in comparison to the height of endorphins still coursing through his veins. He would be slumped over Eggsy had not his leg been propping him up. In the hot clutch of Eggsy’s body, his spent cock feels sensitive, and his body satisfactorily tired. Below him, Eggsy looks about as much as he feels.

“Nap, then lunch, then round two?” Eggsy asks hopefully.

He slowly eases out of Eggsy’s body, lowers his leg back to the bed and rolls onto his back beside him, not even caring if he’s lying in the wet spot. He should take care of the condom, but he’s finding it difficult to move now that he’s prone. “Nap,” he partly agrees, “then we’ll see.”

“You don’t ever make this easy, do you?” But he doesn’t seem to expect an answer as curls up against Harry’s side and lays his cheek against Harry’s chest.

 

_____

 

He brings Eggsy to his preferred chip shop right down by the river where the chips and breading are extra crisp. It’s a guilty pleasure of which he indulges only rarely, but seeing as how he’s long since abandoned his restraint today, he might as well live life to the fullest. It must agree with Eggsy too because he attacks his food with a relish that has Harry longing for the days of being in possession of a swift metabolism.

They remain standing to eat, leaning against the fence and watching the ships and barges lazily drift by. The air has the slightest bite to it, enough to keep them huddled closer together than further apart.

“Alright.” Eggsy swallows the last bite of his chip, uses a paper napkin to wipe a spot of vinegar from the corner of his mouth, and focuses on him. “Are you ever going to ask?”

“Ask?”

“All your burning questions about me. You implied I was being unfair earlier, and I promised you could ask me anything now. I think this counts as a date, albeit in cart before the horse fashion.”

Now that he’s given the opportunity, Harry finds himself curiously incurious about Eggsy. Maybe his reluctance is born from denial, an unwillingness to ruin the inevitable illusion, but there’s something that warns him from peering too closely.

One thing, though. “You weren’t born into wealth.”

He doesn’t think he’d be angry if Eggsy denied it, but Eggsy’s answering pleased smile eases the tension he had been bracing for all the same.

“How’d you figure that one?” Eggsy asks.

“Your accent slipped, while we were….” 

“Ahhh.” Eggsy remains quiet for a moment. “Sometimes, when I’m angry, or drunk, or having really great sex, basically anything that loosens the reins a bit, it comes back.” 

“I suppose there’s a tale to tell there.”

“So are you going to ask me to tell it?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says.

Eggsy tilts his head to the side in consideration. “Am I already ruining the image you have of me?”

“No,” Harry says. “If anything, you’re becoming more interesting.”

“And you don’t want me to be. You want today to be a one-time deal.”

He remains quiet because he can’t contradict Eggsy and doesn’t want to demur purely out of politeness.

“My father was in the marines,” Eggsy says, and Harry is glad for the subject change until Eggsy continues elaborating. “He was killed in action when I was six. I once intended on following in his footsteps.”

He asks, despite himself, “What changed?”

“I grew up. People change. Things happen.” Eggsy shrugs. “I won’t give you my life story if you don’t want it. I want to make this easy for you.”

“Why?” Harry asks. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“Something tells me life rarely has ever done you a kindness.”

“I don’t require pity.”

“I’m not doing it out of pity,” Eggsy says. “I like you a lot, Harry, enough to respect your wishes. You tell me to go, I’ll leave right now.”

Harry’s never met someone so agreeable, especially to his own spurious desires. It catches him wrong footed, makes him doubt himself. Suddenly the prospect of Eggsy walking away, denying Harry his brilliant warmth, now instills great fear despite it all being very much what he had wanted.

Thought he wanted. Should have.

He balls up the sodden paper napkins in his fist and tosses it in a nearby overflowing bin along with the last of his chips. “You said something about round two?”

 

_____

 

It’s very late in the afternoon when Harry drifts back into consciousness, slowly opening his eyes, vision still blurred by sleep. His brain feels muddled in the way it does when he’s overslept, his limbs heavy. He doesn’t remember when he became so tired but given the day’s rather rigourous agenda, it’s hardly surprising.

The sun is sinking, casting its last soft rays of light through his west-facing windows. The sky is of a strange quality, almost pink, and it tints everything it touches that way.

“Hello.” Eggsy stares down at him, something soft in his expression. His skin is golden, as are the parts of his hair that stick straight up from their afternoon activities. He has more markings on his skin now from Harry’s mouth, a trail of them down his neck, across his shoulders. Harry’s body, too, is a mirror of them. He looks at them and wants to retrace them, over and over again, permanently imprinting them onto Eggsy’s skin. “It’s getting late. Do you want me to go?”

No, he is surprised to realise, but today is a whole divergence from his everyday normal. It isn’t sustainable, he knows. All things must eventually come to an end. “I think you better had.” He doesn’t want to get used to this.

Eggsy just leans down and kisses him, slow and sweet, before rolling away to stand up and retrieve his clothes scattered all over the floor. They are, by now, a bit worse for wear, but their worn and wrinkled quality suits Eggsy somehow. Expensive finery presented with a roguish wink and sly nod.

“Can I call you after today?” Eggsy asks when he finishes tying his shoes. He hasn’t bothered to redo his tie, instead letting the fabric hang loosely around his neck. “Or do I attempt to commit this to memory now to keep me warm on many a cold night to come.”

“Something tells me you don’t experience too many of those.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Harry turns onto his side, meeting Eggsy’s eyes. 

“Well?” Eggsy asks playfully.

“I won’t answer if I’m working,” he says. “I work most of the time.”

A quiet transformation plays out across Eggsy’s features, brightening eyes, that mouth so easy to smile now imbued with pleasure. “I can work around that.”

 

_____

 

But the days come and go without Eggsy’s name ever appearing on his mobile’s display, and Harry has too much weariness to hold on.

Such is the nature of temporary entanglements. Two people coming together from disparate worlds, existing within the same space for a single moment in time, only to push off from each other in different trajectories, never to cross paths again.

Only sometimes, late at night or when he waits for interminable hours on end outside Margaret’s flat to be needed, he thinks about it.

The what ifs. The maybes. The almosts.


	2. Chapter 2

It seems Margaret has come to a decision regarding her recently turbulent relationship with her father: complete defiance. She resumes her outings with renewed vigour that borders on manic: restaurants, museums, charity events, dinners, any and all invitations accepted. Harry faithfully accompanies her most of the time, an unobtrusive fixture in her orbit that most ignore unless he needs to make his presence known.

Technically, Harry’s direct employer is Margaret’s father, but given his own natural biases against parental figures, not even Lord Russell can appeal to him to help rein in his wayward daughter.

The continuing disappearances have Margaret’s usual circles on edge. Many have even sought to increase their personal security. He can easily pick them out at any event: solitary, silent figures perched at the edges of the crowd, eyes watchful and alert. Their very demeanour discourages proximity. Together they are a pack of lone wolves in any room.

But despite the uptick in tension, this is steady state for him and he is relieved for it.

He tries to let Eggsy fade into the past and keep his eyes focused on the present, but too often his gaze turns inward instead. Despite knowing that one night (or in this case, day) stands happen all the time, despite having a thorough accounting of the flaws that accompany his strengths, he finds himself unusually plagued by self-doubt.

The simple damning truth of it is: he had believed Eggsy.

It’s not that he hasn’t been proven wrong before, but his instincts have rarely failed him. The lapse now at such a critical time puts him on edge. What more is he letting slip through the cracks?

Tonight finds him in South London in a newly renovated warehouse that is made to appear as little cared for as possible. Industrial pipes mingle with the sparse metal-finished lights that hang low from the rafters. The cement floor is sticky with spilled drinks. The vast space is saturated with more droning house music that encourages mindless movement.

The larger venue that lacks exclusive sections and the decidedly less posh demographic means he has a more arduous task of keeping track of his charge, dodging uncoordinated limbs and young inebriated men all too eager to take offence to an accidental brush past. When he manages to successfully navigate from one end of the room to the other in order to better keep Margaret within his sights, he finds her already ensnared in conversation with another would-be suitor.

When Margaret’s would-be suitor leans back from where he had been leaning in to whisper something in her ear, he recognises Eggsy’s graceful profile: the thick rimmed glasses, the straight nose with the slightest upturn at the end, the pinched corner of his sly mouth.

Eggsy still has the ability to leave him breathless, often painfully so.

Objectively, it makes logical sense. Eggsy is young and beautiful and so is Margaret. They may not have started from the same class, but they are in one together now. Despite what great romantic narratives would lead one to believe, people do, as a rule, prefer to be around others who are similar to themselves.

He tells himself this, over and over again, while the music tunnels in his ear and people bump into him and push him aside as if his very existence were an inconvenience. Perhaps it is.

From an outsider’s perspective, he can see how Eggsy so expertly reels Margaret in, angled forward, attentive, but not so much as to be overbearing. He makes her laugh, the genuine one where she tips her head back and shows too much teeth, not the tight small one she regularly deploys to be polite. His touches are light but strategic: her inner wrist, then her forearm, the insides of his knees slot in with hers. He remembers how those knees felt wrapped around his waist, pressing into his ribs, slick with sweat, as he drove into Eggsy, face to face, breathing in each other’s frenzied panting.

“Haz.”

Harry blinks and is startled to find Margaret right in front of him. Another lapse on his part. Anything could have happened.

“Haz, we’re ready to leave, I think,” Margaret says, none the wiser. The _we_ in question being Eggsy, crowding her close from behind, a caressing hand on her waist, lips pressed against her neck as she leans back into him. “This is Eggsy, my new friend. He’ll be joining us.”

He meets Harry’s eyes over Margaret’s shoulder.

“I’ll call the cab,” Harry says, turning away from them to clear a path towards the exit.

Ever since his father looked him in the eye and told him he was disgusting, he has refused to let anyone ever see him hurt again: not his godfather, not his superior officers, not even his interrogators during a month-long capture.

And certainly not for one meaningless bout of fucking with a beautiful, young boy who also happens to be an excellent liar.

 

_____

 

The thing he remembers the most about Iraq are the sunsets. There were few structures to silhouette the horizon, which became deeply saturated in blood orange. The sun was a perfectly round, wavering disc in that molten sky and seemed so close, he often was tempted to reach his hand out to it to see if he could actually touch it.

Everything slowed down at sunset: people, insects, enemies, his team. They would find a mound of sand to sit on and lay their rifles across their laps, at rest but always ready for ambush.

It was his favourite sort of light, and it especially complimented the angles of Jalwan’s face, his dark honeyed skin, his full lips.

“Does this mean you think I’m ugly the rest of the time, mate?” he joked when Harry shared the thought with him.

“You’ll never look like you do at this very moment ever again,” Harry replied. “I wish I could memorise you beneath every sunset, if only to compare.”

Perhaps too sentimental in retrospect, but he had done just that, hoarded a collection of sunsets and different iterations of the same face until it haunted him in his nightmares.

Now the sunsets he witnesses are often obscured by a fine veil of London clouds, murky and layered as a trifle, when he can even see one at all. Too often he is waiting in the hall outside Margaret’s door because she has come back to the flat after her earlier engagement and wants to rest before she goes out for the evening. His post is situated too far away from the little window at the other end of the landing to see much of anything, and the window is south facing besides.

At first glance, the hallway is immaculate and pristine, but he’s been staring at these walls for so long he is starting to see the flaws in their makeup. A fine hairline crack there. A spot of paint on the moulding from careless painters. An uneven collection of lumps that weren’t sanded down. Rivulets of now dried coffee stains that hadn’t been wiped up.

He studies the walls intently because he does not want to think about what is happening on the other side of them.

And when he can’t possibly have another new thought about them, he breaks the number one rule he had made to himself and thinks about the past instead. He regrets that he could never kiss Jalwan beneath a sunset. There were always too many watchful eyes nearby. Their lovemaking happened only well into the night, quietly, mouths buried in each other’s necks to muffle the sounds, hips only moving minutely so as not to rustle the fabric of the tent itself. He couldn’t see Jalwan’s face during any of those moments, but he felt his lips and teeth and tongue, felt his hands and the thick, smooth mass of his body over him, hot and heavy and comforting.

His musings are sharply interrupted when the door to the flat opens and Eggsy steps out, apparently done for the evening.

He’s better put together than Harry would have thought. His hair is askew from a hand being dragged through it. He hasn’t tucked his shirt back into his trousers. His lips look bitten. He seems startled to see Harry there. “Don’t you get to go home when she’s sleeping?”

“Not if she’s entertaining a guest,” Harry says.

“Good thing I’m not one to stay the night.”

“I’m glad I could save you the trouble then.”

Eggsy doesn’t flinch back or look even the smallest bit guilty. If anything, he seems to grow larger, defiant, his eyes glinting steel behind his glasses. “I never did anything more nor anything less than what you wanted from me.”

It’s funny how someone can be so very right and wrong at the same time. “Do you make it a habit to bed every member of a household? Start with the help, move on to the children? I can find out Lord Russell’s schedule for you so you can have a crack at him too.”

In the face of his snappish words, Eggsy deflates quickly. “Harry,” Eggsy sighs and leans against the door he had just closed. “Believe me when I say I wouldn’t have wanted it to have happened like this.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You made your own choices. Though if you really wanted to get to Margaret, you didn’t have to go through me. I don’t dictate who she decides to bring home. I’m afraid you needlessly put out on that one.”

“I don’t want—” Eggsy starts to argue, but then stops, clenching his jaw and closing his eyes like he’s silently trying to reassert control. When he opens them again, he is visibly calmer. His voice is even. “You’re right. I did make the decision. I just get bored so easily. The good news is that now that I’m done here, you won’t have to see me again. I can tell you’re somewhat upset.”

“Only because you’re keeping me here and wasting my time when I could be having a good night’s rest,” Harry says coolly. “Still, you’re one of the better ones she’s brought home. You were very quick.”

Eggsy blinks and bites the inside of his cheek, quiet for too long before he finally says, with a surprising amount of weight, “Goodbye, Harry.”

He doesn’t say anything in return, and eventually Eggsy pushes off from the door and disappears down the stairs to exit the building. When he dares to peer out the window overlooking the street, he just manages to catch a last glimpse of Eggsy climbing into a waiting cab.

 

_____

 

On his usual Sunday off, Harry may very well regret spending the day spreading out his limbs across the small fire escape landing while emptying a bottle of scotch he’d been saving for some sort of undetermined special occasion. He’s not sure why he even thought there would be any more future special occasions in store for him in the first place, and certainly nothing worth celebrating, but he’s now come to grips with reality and decided the scotch would be of greater use to him today.

He doesn’t actually drink all that often and the sudden excess now has a heady effect on his senses before he’s even halfway through the bottle. His mouth is numb and his throat burns with acid. His head feels heavy and disassociated from the rest of his body. His vision is blurry. His thoughts keep ricocheting around the inside of his skull.

Earlier, he’d been determined to watch a damned sunset, but he passes out against the cool metal bars instead and the next thing he knows, he’s waking up feeling like death in the early pre-dawn chill and his mobile is ringing obnoxiously.

It’s not a number he recognises and he’s half tempted to ignore it, but curiosity eventually wins out.

“Yes?” he rasps while cradling his aching head.

It’s not a prank caller or the wrong number or even a telemarketer. It’s the police.

There’s been a veritable slaughter at the estate: all of the security guards and household staff that had been on the premises. Many had their limbs sliced clean off or had been discovered with severe puncture wounds in vital places.

No one had been spared. No witnesses.

Lord Russell and his family have gone missing.

 

_____

 

The interviews with the police are tedious and demeaning. Each thinly veiled interrogation seems to highlight another damning aspect of Harry’s failure. He wasn’t another hacked up body on the grounds because he hadn’t been on the premises. He hadn’t been on the premises because he hadn’t been needed. He hadn’t been needed because there were better men for the job.

What did he get up to when the family was on the estate and did not require him? Drink mostly. Occasionally pick up young men to shag. No, he didn’t pay them.

Did he hold any ill will towards the Russell family or any other upper class British citisen given his own personal history of being disowned and disinherited from Lord and Lady Hart? He only spent the better part of his life, abilities, and organs in defending and protecting their freedom and safety to hold as many frivolous charity galas as they so pleased.

His brand of humour, Harry senses, is rather lost on the DIs.

Did he or his charge meet any suspicious persons prior to the Russell family’s kidnapping? Here, Harry hesitates. He could say that Eggsy’s appearances in his life were coincidental, that his callous actions of moving on from him to Margaret were simply the byproduct of a healthy young sexual appetite.

Then he recalls all the small hairline cracks in what, on the surface, seemed like just another common occurrence, all the moments where the pieces didn’t quite slot into place. Eggsy, the young tailor with the musculature he had only ever seen among his fellow Special Forces team. The bruises that were somehow more extensive than a mere clumsy bump into the edge of the furniture.

Something about his unshakeable confidence, the way he just managed to be everything Harry ever wanted, obtainable and yet never fully within reach.

“No,” he tells the DIs. No one unusual.

Once he’s proven himself thoroughly useless to the Met, they leave him alone.

Now he’s faced with unlimited amounts of free time for the foreseeable future, being out of a job with few prospects of getting another. There isn’t much of a demand for bodyguards whose charges were kidnapped, after all.

Harry, restless and impatient by nature, has never really enjoyed time off. It’s how his godfather had nurtured a love for so many diverse hobbies and sports when he had been young. Always needing to be moving, always needing to keep his mind and hands and feet engaged. The notion of downtime had further been sullied by his last encounter with it: an enforced medical one mostly confined to a bed until he relearned every basic bodily function and how to compensate for his suddenly absent depth perception.

Suffice to say, he handles his free time poorly.

The dust bin collects empty bottles more than it does actual food containers.

There are some days where he simply watches the shadows slowly crawl across the walls, never even bothering to get out of bed.

He hates the telly and every new missing case that crops up so he makes the executive decision to put his foot through the bloody screen.

He hates the feeling of being unmoored, not knowing what direction he ought to be drifting towards next.

One time after consuming too much alcohol and staring into the darkness, he feels it coalesce inside him to the point of being near unbearable.

He calls Eggsy. Or tries to.

Instead of Eggsy’s warm, knowing voice, all he gets is a customer complaints line. It’s like Eggsy never existed, slipping into and out of his life like the receding tide.

 

_____

 

One afternoon as he heads back to his home from the off-licence, he walks past an unusually long queue that wraps around the block. Having not noticed when it had formed, he can’t tell what everyone’s waiting on either.

“What’s all this about?” he asks the person closest to him, a young man who must barely be in his twenties if that.

The youth looks at him strangely. “You don’t know?” And upon Harry’s arched brow, says with an air of incredulity, “Valentine’s free SIM cards are being handed out today.”

The news seems remarkably underwhelming. It must show on his face, because the boy then says, “Where have you been? He’s made everything free. Free calls, text, and data, mate. We’ve been camped out all morning.”

Vaguely, Harry recalls having heard something along these lines awhile ago. It sounds too good to be true, and it if weren’t for the incredibly massive queue of people currently awaiting their free SIM card, Harry would have thought it to be an elaborate scam. The suspicious side of him still wonders at the catch, but there’s a growing practical part of him that knows that London’s an expensive place in which to live and he hasn’t got much coming in anymore.

The prospect of eliminating his mobile bill is an appealing one, and if it weren’t for the fact he was currently jostling several bottles of liquor in his arms, he might have gone and queued up right there and then with everyone else.

Another time, if he still remembers this moment tomorrow.

 

_____

 

It’s a benefit sometimes, Harry thinks, to be alone in the world. He is to carry out his downward spiral without interruption, and for that, he is grateful. It’s why the sudden knock on his door now is so irrationally vexing. There’s absolutely no one in the world he wants to see and there certainly shouldn’t be anyone who wants to see him.

Nevertheless, the knocking refuses to desist and he’s not descended to the misanthropic level of shouting through the door just yet. As he stumbles over his less than sober feet to answer it, he briefly wonders if it’s the police come to arrest him after all. As he nears the door, he ever so briefly wonders if it’s Eggsy.

It turns out to be neither.

Chester King uses the opportunity of his shock to study him, and from the downturn of his mouth, Harry can tell he’s far from impressed.

“You haven’t forgotten all your manners, have you, Harry?”

For the moment, yes, he had, but Chester’s words, vaguely contemptuous, jolt him out of his stupour and he silently backs away from the door, leaving Chester to show himself in. Harry’s back is turned, but he can imagine the series of sour expressions on Chester’s face, from the barely restrained sneer at the state of his flat (now in somewhat dire straits due to simply not giving a fuck) to the withering purse of his lips at his broken television to the narrowed eyes of disgust at the number of empties overflowing from the bin onto the floor. When he turns back to Chester, he is met with a flat look of disapproval. “Would you care for some tea? I’m afraid I only have bagged.”

“One of your more exasperating traits, Harry, is your insistence upon maintaining your dignity even in the most humiliating situations. I can’t tell if it’s something I should admire or pity.”

Seeing as how Chester never indicated his preferences one way or another, Harry goes ahead and plugs in the electric kettle, which earns another frown, and retrieves two ceramic mugs from the cupboard that he deems to be more or less clean after a quick rinse under the tap. “I would offer you a seat, but there’s apparently nothing in this flat that would serve your arse justice.”

Chester grimaces. “I heard about your little incident with the Russells. Most everyone, in fact, is familiar with your relationship with them.”

“Somehow, I don’t think you came to offer your condolences,” Harry says. “So why are you here, Chester?”

“You used to be better at small talk.”

“I used to be better at a great many things.”

“You used to be better, full stop.” And Harry cannot argue that point. At his silence, Chester scoffs. “Let’s face it, Harry, this little experiment of yours hasn’t really worked out, now has it?”

He can see the way his knuckles go white from holding the handle of one of the mugs. “Experiment?”

“Thinking you’re a man of the people simply to thumb your nose at your privileged upbringing. Yes, yes, very egalitarian. _Let them eat cake_ and all. We’ve let you have your fun and now look where it’s got you. You have little more respect than the homeless person I had to squeeze past to even enter the building.”

“As far as I’ve fallen, I know I’ll always respect myself more than I could ever respect you.”

This earns him a glare. Chester even sees fit to approach him, stepping into hitting range. He’s a man far shorter in height than Harry, but has always carried himself with an immense self-possession Harry couldn’t even hope to emulate. Even though Harry loathes the man with ever fibre of his being, the imprint to please is still there and the shame of disappointment will always echo in the back of his mind. “You may claim to hate me, Harry, but everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you. You were supposed to be my greatest achievement. You had so much potential, only to have gone and thrown it all away.”

“What do you want?” Harry asks impatiently.

“I’m here to give you one final chance,” Chester says, “to turn the perilous course of your life around.”

“Oh, you’re _giving_ it to me….”

“You may have turned your back on your family, your friends, and opportunity itself, but I won’t do the same,” Chester says, and it takes everything within himself to bite his tongue at that. “You only need to agree to come with me right now and you’ll not only be safe, but will have a place by my side.”

A prickle of alarm crawls across the back of his neck. “What are you talking about?”

“The world is about to change, Harry, and only a select few have been chosen to have a place within it.”

Something clicks. All the missing persons: celebrities, notable figures, well-known experts, the very wealthy. “You know who’s behind the kidnappings.”

Chester tips his head slightly. There’s a pleased light in his eyes that Harry recalls from childhood after he had said or done something especially clever. He hates that he still feels a spike of pleasure in seeing it now. “They’re all safe, I can assure you, even your precious family. In fact, it was Lord Russell all along who arranged for his wife and children to be picked up and carried off to, shall we say, a secure location?”

“You…” Harry swallows, trying to work through his disbelief. “All those people murdered just so—”

“Their deaths were merciful compared to what awaits the rest of the world in a few weeks’ time,” Chester says. “So I’m asking you now, Harry, do you still want to be a man of the people?”

“You’re insane to think I would ever join you,” he snaps, “and that I won’t take this directly to the police.”

Chester sighs, expression turning resigned. “I don’t know why I still maintain my hopes for you. I am always disappointed.”

“Get out.”

Chester checks the time on his watch. “The problem with you noble types,” he says, and suddenly Harry feels a sharp sting at his neck. His hand flies up to rip out what looks to be some sort of...miniature dart? “Is that you always want to play the martyr for your cause.”

“What’dya….” Harry blinks. The world starts grow blurry, darkness crowding in at the edges of his vision. He feels like he’s slowly being sucked down a dark drain. The kettle starts to beep incessantly, rumbling with boiling water. Vaguely, he feels himself clutching the edges of the counter top only to collapse onto his floor. All he can see are Chester’s polished black oxfords. Same style as Eggsy’s.

“Well, I’m not going to let you do that to yourself, Harry. Not again,” he hears from somewhere above him, sounding further and further away. “You will learn to obey this time, because when all is said and done, you’ll have no other choice.”

 

_____

 

It’s a long, arduous slog to wakefulness, and even as Harry opens his eyes and tries to muddle through the heavy fog in his mind and blink away the vestiges of cloudiness in his vision, he knows down to the very marrow in his bones that something isn’t right.

Perhaps the reason why he feels so disoriented is because he has no idea where he is.

The bed he lies in is large and luxurious and therefore most certainly not his. When he turns his heavy head, he finds himself in a small but well-appointed space. There’s a lounge area in one corner with the sort of modern banquette seating that doesn’t believe in back support and an overly-equipped entertainment console station. The centre of the space is sectioned out as a designated dining area with a sleek, modern table and chair that ought to be the set design for some science fiction film. There are two doors, one which is partly open and reveals the distinct shapes of a shower stall, sink, and toilet, and the other, large, metal, and impenetrable, is firmly shut without so much as a handle or knob.

The accommodations are thorough, thoughtful, and alarming: they reference great care to ensure he is comfortable. They indicate his stay here is to be long term.

The air is cool, chilly almost. He reaches up to touch the wall above his head and discovers the stone texture walls to be just that: actual stone, solid and thickly constructed. As insane as the notion is, he can’t shake the idea that he’s in some sort of bloody cave.

It takes a moment to sit up, and when he does, his head swims sickeningly. Another mystery: he doesn’t know how he got here, though with the amounts of alcohol he’d been consuming late, theoretically anything was possible.

When he can trust his feet will hold him up despite the way the world still turns sickeningly around him, he moves to the solid metal door and confirms his suspicions that he’s locked in. There’s a small metal seam in the centre of the door itself, a window of some sort, but like the door itself, there is nothing to open it from within. He presses his ear to the cool metal. There is a lack of hollowness, which means the door is solid, but faintly, he can hear the sounds of angry banging and even the tail ends of multiple shouts of outrage. He’s not alone in this, whatever this is.

His mind naturally goes to all the missing persons paraded across the various news cycles over the past months. But if there is indeed a connection, than how the bloody hell did he get caught up in it? Did someone come after him because of his meagre link to the Russells? But no, that couldn’t be right. He would have been killed just as every security worker was.

He’s missing something, he knows. It’s the feeling of knowing there’s an absence. It hovers just out of understanding, like a figment he can only see out of the corner of his eye, and the more he strives to pin it down, the further out of reach it moves.

Why had there been so much investment in keeping him alive?

In frustration, he bangs his fist against the door, causing a loud clang to reverberate through the room but little else. The door feels as solid as it looks; there will be no fast nor easy escape.

With few other choices readily available to him, Harry sits on the edge of the bed and waits.

 

_____

 

Meals are passed through the slot in the door by a stone faced guard in white three times a day, the choice of food generally indicative of the time of day. It’s rather upscale, organic fare for all that it’s being served to veritable prisoners.

The guards don’t say anything and refuse to answer any of Harry’s questions.

He waits, lets a few meals go by, and observes how he can hear the echoes of the guards’ approach through other prisoners being served their meals down the hall. There is the sound of their footsteps and something heavy, a trolley most likely, being pushed and stopped every so often. The window is opened with a groan of metal, the prisoner pleads or shouts in rage or tries to appeal to the guards’ humanity, the window is closed.

One day, Harry waits and when the window is opened, his hand snatches up the wrist holding his tray, causing the contents of his meal to fall from the guard’s startled hand.

His yelp of surprise is cut short as Harry yanks his arm through the window and pulls the guard in close enough to grab a fistful of his clothes, tightening it to noose-like pressure around his neck and cutting off his oxygen. “Open this door now or I’ll snap your neck.”

“You—won’t—get...very far!” the guard chokes out, struggling against Harry’s grip.

In what small snatches of the world he can glimpse beyond the guard’s body, Harry has to admit that he may just be right. The corridor is long and fortress-like. He’s very likely deep in the heart of it, one man against an unknown number of enemies.

And already, a good lot of those enemies are running towards his cell. Harry returns his attention to the man in his grip, loosening it just enough to allow the guard to give him the answers he wants. “Who do you work for?”

“Val—Valentine!”

“Valentine?” It takes a moment. “Richmond Valentine, the one giving away all those free SIM cards to the world?”

“He’s going to fix the world.”

It’s such messianic narcissist bollocks, he can’t help but give the guard a few rough shakes for even saying such things with a straight face. “How? What do the SIM cards have to do with it?”

“That’s not something you have to worry about. You’re being kept here for your own protection! You’ll have a place in the new world.”

The most disconcerting aspect of it all is not what the guard said but the utter conviction in his tone. He believes what he’s saying, genuinely convinced that he’s a part of something larger and greater than himself.

It’s all Harry manages to get from the guard before the others descend upon them. Enough of them manage to pull their fellow guard from Harry’s stranglehold, and once the window is free, Harry only has time to flinch back from the pistol filling the space of the window. He feels the sting of a dart in his neck, and only has enough time to feel a bizarre sense of deja vu before his body crumples to the floor and he’s pulled under.

 

_____

 

The first to go is his sense of time. There are no windows to track the days. He suspects the meals aren’t being served at set timetables. The food, which, Harry is learning, travels across the world in terms of cuisine, no longer becomes landmarks by which to determine the meal of the day. The entertainment system only plays a pre-arranged selection of films and does not have access to satellite. There are no clocks or computers or anything with a digital chronological display at all.

It’s maddening.

The guards now point a tranquiliser gun at him first when delivering meals, but Harry doesn’t bother with a second attempt at rebellion. Until his door is fully opened, he hasn’t a chance in hell of making further progress other than earning himself another involuntary nap.

So he waits again. The film collection is mindlessly cycled through. The small smattering of books in the library, mostly terrible airport best sellers and a surprisingly sizable science portion on global warming, are read. Every inch of his cell is explored out of due diligence (nothing of interest to note, no sharp weapons). He paces, then he exercises, then he wishes he had more scotch.

With so little to do and boredom nearly making him want to repeatedly bash his head against the stone walls, his thoughts begin to overlap until they circle back further and further into the past more often than not. On the whole, it was, in retrospect, far more exciting times. He tries to recall the feeling of being in immediate danger, with the very air feeling electric and prickling across his skin, adrenaline pumping through his veins, the hot sting of sand in his nose and the sun burning his cheeks.

He thinks about the last time he was in prolonged captivity, subjected to periods of utter terror and debilitating boredom, hooded and chained up in back rooms of a series of decrepit houses, moved around the country nearly once a week and wondering if each day would be his last. First they tortured him for information, and when that wasn’t forthcoming, they tortured him for fun.

At least the constant pain had blunted the length of his stay. It had been weeks before he realised no one was coming to save him. If he wanted to live, he had to save himself. And he had, by the skin of his teeth.

He used to thrive on doing very dangerous things that actually made the world just a slightly better place. The met goals energised him and imbued his life with significance. Sometimes those efforts felt a little less meaningful because the work never seemed to end or the toll had been particularly costly, but collectively, Harry can look back on his life and feel satisfaction with his life’s work.

What happened to that self-resilience? That urgency and fire that used to run so hotly? That determination to overcome against all odds? Harry doesn’t feel any of it now. He just feels tired. Resigned. An old book already read through and discarded, left with its pages dog-eared and torn, spine cracked, and all around worse for wear.

Perhaps ten years ago he would have been motivated to bring down this bloody mountain on top of everyone beneath it or die trying. A protagonist’s prerogative. Today, he has to accept his fate of being removed from the narrative, absented from the main course of action because of his diminished importance.

 

_____

 

On some undetermined day and time, something happens to break up the monotony. Harry isn’t sure what that catalyst is, but he can hear its effects in the form of guards shouting and running through the corridors outside his cell. Even more faintly, he thinks he hears the volley of gunfire, but he can’t be sure what’s real and what’s memory.

It goes on for some time, and then it stops and it’s quiet again.

Harry starts to think he’s simply hallucinated the whole event when he’s startled from his disappointment by sounds of _explosions_ , hundreds of them, echoing through the corridors like fireworks. He can feel the faintest of tremours in the walls and beneath his feet.

Someone outside his cell seems to agree with him because Harry next hears the sound of a jubilant shout. It’s encouraging enough for him to begin banging frantically on his door again.

The window is suddenly opened and Harry abruptly finds himself looking into Eggsy’s shocked face. “Harry? What the hell are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Harry accuses. After all, Eggsy isn’t the one trapped in a cell. Upon closer inspection, though, it appears he hasn’t had an easy time of it. His cheeks are flush. His hair is falling into disarray from its careful styling. There’s a sheen of exertion on his brow. He’s practically vibrating with coiled energy. “Can you get me out?”

A cheeky smile sneaks across Eggsy’s mouth. “If I let you out, will you give me a kiss as a reward?”

Harry blinks at the suggestive tone, but any stuttering reply he’s about to make is sharply cut off.

“You motherfucker. Did you treally hink I was stupid enough to implant one of those things in my own head?” Valentine’s angry voice shouts over the speakers. “What are you, fucking crazy? All the innocent people killed and for what? You didn’t stop shit! It’s still happening!”

Eggsy turns back to him. “Sorry, love, I’ve got to go save the world, be back in a tick.”

“Get me out of here and I’ll help you,” Harry insists.

“Look, Harry, I don’t think….”

He surges forward in as much as he can with a thick door separating them. “I’ve had a bloody gun in my hand for longer than you’ve been alive, so don’t you dare tell me it’s a not a good idea, you little berk. I can take care of myself, just get me out.”

Eggsy just stares at him, taken aback, before he says, “Merlin, what’s the code for the door?...Just trust me, yeah?”

Harry frowns, about to ask him who the hell he’s talking to when Eggsy keys in the code and pushes the door open, forcing him to back up. Eggsy, wearing the same suit he had worn on their single day together, now stands in the open doorway, waiting. “Well?”

When Harry steps outside his cell, it’s to a sea of headless bodies.

But there isn’t time to ask questions or demand explanations. Eggsy is lifting a rifle from one of the guards, and so Harry follows suit, pocketing two sidearms he finds from other bodies along the way.

The tunnels seem long, winding, and endless, but the most resistance they encounter is trying not to trip over the corpses strewn over the floor. Eggsy seems to know the way, making sure decisions to turn left or right when the choice comes upon them until Harry starts to hear the faintly uplifting notes of...KC & The Sunshine Band?

Eggsy bounds forward into the large, empty atrium that is awash in manic flashing lights, aiming his rifle at the room above them and letting loose a salvo of firepower to batter against the bulletproof glass windows. Harry just catches two figures in the room leaping back to dodge the incoming assault.

The advantage does not last very long, however, when a woman suddenly leaps out from the now open space, firing back with her own weapon. Harry immediately dives for cover, but Eggsy merely raises his arms over his face, somehow deflecting each incoming bullet like that.

Now that she’s on the same level, Harry notices the gleaming prosthetic blades she wears for feet and how she immediately launches a swift, deadly attack on Eggsy, cutting down the barrel of his rifle with each sweep of her legs.

Eggsy’s been trained in hand-to-hand combat, Harry idly notes, and even if he’s not able to gain the upper hand against the girl’s impressive offence, he’s at least skilled enough to keep himself from getting immediately minced by her blades.

It isn’t his fight, he knows.

As the music and flashing lights suddenly start back up again, Harry glances up at Valentine standing at some sort of console table with back turned towards them.

Harry skirts around the edges of the room, crawling over more headless bodies, this time ones more expensively clothed, and finds the narrow set of stairs that must lead up to the mezzanine level.

“What the fuck, who the hell are yo—” Valentine has just enough time to look up at him in surprise and confusion before Harry points one of his stolen pistols at Valentine’s hand on the console and shoots it.

“Fuck! Fuck, what did you do, man? You ruined it!” Valentine screams as he falls back, clutching his ravaged, bleeding hand. The music and lights swiftly die down again. On the screens around them, Harry can see some map of the world in fading tones of angry red.

Harry looks down at the woman and Eggsy, both of whom have ceased their fight to look back up at him in twin expressions of disbelief.

“Gazelle!” Valentine screams from behind him. “Kill these motherfuckers now!”

Gazelle whips her predatory focus back onto Eggsy and her legs tense as she prepares to leap.

Harry raises his gun again and shoots out each of her kneecaps.

Gazelle cries out sharply and crumples to the floor, her greatest weapons of little use to her now.

“Jesus, Harry,” Eggsy says, turning to him again. There’s something in Eggsy’s eyes. Awe, maybe. Admiration. Lust.

But no, that can’t be right.

But before he can pin down the exact sentiment, gagging noises draw his attention back to the room, and Harry turns just in time to bear witness to Valentine vomiting up all over himself.


	3. Chapter 3

The rising sun glints off the wings of Kingsman’s private jet so brightly, Harry has to avert his gaze. Instead, he looks down at Margaret’s head pillowed in his lap. He’s managed to source a blanket to cocoon her with against the cool pressurised air of the cabin and she didn’t even stir the whole time he was tucking in the edges around her. She hadn’t even recognised Eggsy when she had seen him.

Once released from her cell, Margaret couldn’t be pried away from his side. He had insisted the Russells—sans patriarch, who now resided somewhere among the headless bodies waiting to be identified in Valentine’s bunker—would ride back with them or he would stay behind and wait with his family for the clean-up crews. His first duty has always been to his charge.

The man Eggsy calls Merlin, who was on the other end of Eggsy’s communications back in the bunker to give him guidance (“More like edicts,” Eggsy said with a snort), had given him a narrow-eyed, disgruntled look but reluctantly acquiesced when faced with Harry’s stubborn expression and Eggsy’s pleading one.

In the seat across from his, Eggsy has hardly taken his eyes off of him save but to eagerly greet and hug his fellow Kingsman they picked up along the way, a young woman in a jumpsuit with flushed cheeks and doe eyes who introduced herself as Lancelot. He was told she was instrumental in taking down Valentine’s satellite to give Eggsy time to infiltrate the bunker, apparently by shooting a missile at it from the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

“My codename is Galahad.”

Harry looks up and meets Eggsy’s eyes. There are reddening marks on his cheek and jaw that are sure to bruise and a scabbed over gash on his lower lip. He’s ditched his tie somewhere along the way, loosened the top buttons of his shirt. Sweat has left his hair in darkened clumps over his forehead. He looks both rakish and eternally weary.

“Galahad the Pure, as the stories go.”

“ _My strength is as the strength of ten: Because my heart is pure_ ,” Harry quotes.

“Something like that,” Eggsy says, smirking, but there’s barely any energy behind it.

Harry feels about the same. The adrenaline has long since worn off and now his whole body feels like it could sink into the cool earth to sleep for a hundred years. The air of exhaustion seems to have permeated the entire cabin. Mrs Russell is curled around her youngest son in another chair, both asleep. Lancelot had joined Merlin up in the front and if Harry concentrates, he can hear their occasional soft murmurs over the white noise of the jet’s engines.

“I don’t know if you are or not,” he finally says after a measured length of time. “I don’t know anything about you at all.”

Eggsy’s smile dims. “Well, now you know my codename, at least. You know my real name too. You could look me up. You could learn my whole sordid history from it. At least my police records.”

Harry presses his head against the cushion of his seat and regards the young man in front of him. Even as unkempt as Eggsy is now, it’s difficult to look at him and think he has a criminal record. If Harry ever looked into it, he’d only be getting half the story. Whatever past Eggsy sprung from, much of it has been scrubbed away from him now. “Why did you target me initially? The only possible answer I can come up with is to get to the Russells somehow, but you could have gone straight to Margaret in the first place.”

Eggsy’s gaze bores into his. “I did it so I could access and make a copy of your keys, including the keys to Margaret’s flat. I could have always picked the lock, but I knew your history. I knew an observant person like you who literally spent hours staring at that door might have noticed when someone had broken in. In the afternoon we spent together, I gave you a light sedative to make sure you’d stay unconscious for at least a few hours. After all the shagging we did, I knew you’d chalk up any lingering tiredness to that. I also downloaded all your data from your phone and laptop, but there wasn’t anything to find there.”

Though Harry feels his face burning with humiliation, he refuses to look away. No, Eggsy wouldn’t have found anything of interest to him save for perhaps a few racy photographs Harry had allowed himself to keep when the loneliness got to be too much. He wonders if Eggsy thinks he’s pathetic: his spartan, empty little life. “And Margaret?”

“It was difficult at first. She hadn’t been going out as much as her previous pattern had suggested she would have done. When she finally did start leaving the flat again, we bugged it to monitor her communications, specifically the ones she was having with Lord Russell, who was the real target we were investigating. We knew he was associating with Valentine, but that was all we knew. Russell was quite clever and justifiably paranoid. He gave his daughter a phone that was heavily encrypted. The only way to access it was to upload the malware manually.”

“Hence why you approached her and slept with her.”

But Eggsy shakes his head, and his voice almost becomes desperately sincere. “I didn’t sleep with her, Harry. I did everything in my power to make it look like I did, but once the door to her flat closed, I administered a Kingsman-formulated chemical that has concentrated amnesiac properties with relatively clean side effects. It’s generally only used when targets are already inebriated so they would be less likely to question the gap in their memories. She wouldn’t remember who I was or that I was even there, only that she had a nice time with a nice gentleman and felt particularly well rested.”

Harry thinks about when he first awoke in Valentine’s bunker, unable to recall how he had got there, ascribing it to having happened while he’d been utterly pissed. He thinks he’s starting to understand.

“But I didn’t sleep with her. I wouldn’t,” Eggsy repeats.

He doesn’t know whether to be mollified or offended on behalf of his charge. He doesn’t know why he should feel relief anyway. Eggsy can do as he pleases, and has, even if it was all in the name of the job. “Whatever you were doing didn’t prevent them from being kidnapped and dragged to Valentine’s base of operations anyway.”

“No, we didn’t understand the extent of it until it was too late.” Eggsy’s gaze finally falters. “We were being undermined by one of our own all along, our very leader, no less. Chester King.”

“My godfather is the head of a secret spy agency.” In hindsight, the absurd notion makes a certain kind of sense for all of Chester’s insistence on Harry joining him, insisting Harry join this team or that club at school or cultivate those skills. That his godfather was also a traitor also does not surprise him. He’s learned firsthand how deep Chester King’s betrayal can run.

“Was. There was, uh, an incident.”

Said _incident_ turns out to be Chester King’s corpse still collapsed over the head of the table in the back of the Kingsman shop next to a inadvertently self-poisoned glass of brandy.

“Between this and the countdown, there hadn’t been much time to take care of the body,” Eggsy explains.

Harry stares into the dead, milky eyes of his godfather and feels very little. Not even pity. He used to love this man very much, more so than his own biological father. But that was a very long time ago.

There’s an open gash behind Chester’s ear that is dotted with congealed blood. Eggsy, who had remained silent while Harry took in the sight of his godfather’s body, notices the new source of his focus and says, “He had one of Valentine’s chips implanted in his head. It’s how we were able to hack into Valentine’s system and set off all the others.”

Harry finally tears his gaze away from the body and looks up at Eggsy. “He was the one who had me kidnapped and brought to Valentine’s bunker.” No one else could have or would have done it, Harry knows now. “I suppose he wanted to save me even still. I just don’t know why. He was always trying to bring me into this and I always resisted. You’d think I’d be far too old and injured now to bother with.”

“I think I know why,” Eggsy says quietly.

When Harry gives him a questioning glance, Eggsy stands up and retrieves a tablet that had been sitting atop the fireplace mantle. “Merlin only just started sorting through King’s records, but one of his most recent actions was to update his will.”

After a few more taps on the screen, Eggsy turns the device around and slides it towards him. Harry hesitantly brings the tablet up to read, skimming over the various legalese until he sees—”I don’t understand.”

“Looks like he was always intending on you being his heir, Harry,” Eggsy tells him, “though I guess he thought he still had plenty of time to turn things around and with what he had hoped would be a new world order in place, you’d be more willing to accept his guidance.”

He’d been made the sole recipient of Chester King’s entire estate and finances. Some of the final figures make his head spin just a bit. King had been far wealthier than even his own family had been. Among Harry’s new property, though, includes the Kingsman tailor shop. “I can’t own a business that’s a front for a bloody spy agency.”

“You can if you are that spy agency’s leader,” Merlin says as he steps into the dining room. “It appears we now have an opening, and our previous Arthur was already grooming you to follow in his footsteps.”

“You must be joking.” Harry looks between Merlin and Eggsy, trying to see who will crack first, but they are both very serious. “I don’t know a single thing about Kingsman. I’ve never been a spy.”

“No, but you were military, and then Special Forces,” Eggsy says. “That’s often been the basis for recruiting many of our previous agents. And you have proven strong leadership skills. You know strategy and tactics. You’re incredibly detailed and observant. You’re intuitive. You’re reliable. Loyal. You put the needs of others ahead of yourself. To say nothing of your marksmanship, christ.”

“I’m an outsider. And military training is a different animal from espionage,” Harry refutes. “Surely you have people you can hire from within your own ranks. One of your other skilled agents who knows the ins and outs of your agency better than I.”

Eggsy and Merlin share a glance before Eggsy looks back at Harry. “We don’t know how many are still alive yet after today, never mind who was in Chester’s pocket.”

“Need I remind you that I was Chester’s top pick for the job. In light of what has happened, that should make you trust me even less.”

“Guess there’s still some things King and I can agree on,” Eggsy says. “But you hated King. Your values clearly ran counter to his. In my eyes, that’s an argument for, not against.”

“What Eggsy is trying to say is that if anything, what happened in the last twenty-four hours has shown us that we need to make some changes in how this agency is run,” Merlin adds. “Under King’s leadership, we had become too set in our ways, only bringing in people who think like us to bolster our own echo chamber. Things started to change when Eggsy was brought in, and then later, Roxy—Lancelot, I should say. But more is clearly needed. It’s time we stop navel-gazing and start instituting real reform. That starts at the top.”

Harry’s fingers are clenching the tablet so hard they turn white, so he carefully sets it down and folds his hands on the table. “I’m not a bureaucrat. I’m not cut out for a desk job.”

“It’s not really just any old desk job,” Eggsy points out. “I guarantee you it’s lot more exciting than what you’ve been doing. And you need that excitement, don’t you, Harry? You’ve been slowly dying for years.”

Harry remains silent, clenching his jaw, hating how Eggsy knows so much about him, all the things he thought he’d been so careful in hiding away.

“It’s a chance to make a real difference again. To have what you do matter. It’s why I became a Kingsman,” Eggsy says. “I know because I see it in you too, Harry.”

“I’ll think about it,” he says, because it’s too much now. Too similar to the things he’s always wanted. He’s never trusted anything that was simply handed to him. There was always a catch: He could have his godfather’s approval so long as he went along with his plan for Harry’s life. He could have his parents’ love so long as he smothered that part of himself they hated.

He looks at Eggsy again. Beautiful, deadly, siren song Eggsy. He could have him too, he thinks bitterly, so long as he was willing to not peer too closely to what lay behind the illusion.

 

_____

 

The world is reeling. So many top leaders and their advisors are dead, the contents of their heads splattered across the walls of the secure bunkers within which they had hidden away. There’s also a number of dead across the world from the very brief time Valentine’s hand had kept his rage-induced signal active, though it could have been exponentially higher. America had got it the worst with so many guns and cars freely available.

England had come off relatively lightly: their death toll numbers totaled less than five hundred, but it’s still a number that is too high, and for the past week, the world has been quiet, frozen into a collective state of trauma.

Harry spends most of his days at the Russell’s London residence because he’s one of their few security guards left. For the time being, Margaret has moved back in with her mother and brother in an effort to shore up their reserves.

He’s disconcerted by the way they frequently address him now. Margaret keeps inviting him to the table for meals. Mrs Russell tries to draw him into conversations and asking for his opinion on matters like he was now a member of the family, not the help. It’s as if what they had experienced permanently erased the invisible boundaries that had previously defined their roles. The carefully crafted script had been torn up and thrown out and now all they could do was improvise.

He tries to resist it, if politely. The world will soon be put to rights, the old hierarchy and patterns of behaviour would reassert themselves because humans rarely change, and Harry’s presence would once again be relegated to the shadows.

He’s restless.

He dreams about the gun in his hand. Shooting Valentine, then Gazelle, frequently Chester himself. They’re not always non-lethal shots. They don’t always take place in the bunker but out in the desert beneath the hot, unrelenting sun or in one of the dark little rooms where his head had been shoved into a bucket of water for minutes at a time.

He dreams about trying to stem the bleeding from Jalwan’s gut wound with shaking hands. But as the blood bubbles up between his fingers, he frantically looks up into Eggsy’s pale face instead.

 

_____

 

At a tentative lunch gathering at a recently re-opened restaurant for anyone who was left among the Russell’s friends and acquaintances, Merlin quietly joins him at his station at the back of the restaurant, perched like a wallflower as the people around him make merry with the ample assistance of libations.

Merlin is a tall and thin man, slightly taller than even Harry himself. He’s worn a jumper nearly every time Harry’s seen him but for the initial one when Merlin had been pretending to be a pilot. He’s balding and has a laser-like gaze that is akin to what Harry imagines being an insect pinned to a board would feel like. His very presence is quiet but commanding, and Harry half wonders why Merlin won’t take the position of Arthur himself.

“You lost your eye on your last mission,” Merlin says. “The injuries ended your career. Almost two years to make a physical recovery. Still some right hand weakness and lack of coordination which you’ve compensated for by teaching yourself to become ambidextrous. Occasional seizures but it’s controlled with medication, which you probably don’t adhere to very well given how many charges from the off-license you have on your credit card.”

“Yes, you can hack into my medical records. Bully for you,” Harry says.

“I only bring it up because there are other ways Kingsman can help you. We have significantly more advanced technology than any government including our own, certainly more than what you see on the markets.” From the corner of his eye, Harry can see Merlin studying him. “World-class plastic surgeons. Our bio-prosthetics are extraordinary and you’d be a viable candidate for a new eye.”

“Are you saying there’s something wrong with me currently?” Harry asks just to be contrary, because he knows what this is and hates it. Hates it for feeling weak enough to desire it. “That I’m now lesser for my injuries?”

“There’s nothing wrong with or less capable about you. If anything, you’ve proven that well enough already,” Merlin dismisses. “But there’s also nothing wrong with wanting back something you lost either.”

A sharp bark of laughter cuts through the air. Mrs Davis-Llewellyn is in rare form today, having spilt a glass of red wine all over her light cream dress. “Bloody hell, I look like I’ve just murdered someone. Wish it’d been my husband.”

The others all moan in sympathy with her even as they try to stifle their laughter. “Code red, code red! Someone get a sparkling water, I’ve got this one!”

“Nice party,” Merlin remarks. “I’ll leave you to it then. But Harry?”

Harry turns to look at him.

“You should decide soon, one way or the other. There’s a lot of work to be done. Things move a bit faster in Kingsman’s world.”

 

_____

 

Eggsy shows up at the Russell’s in the middle of the night. More specifically, right in his room after scaling two stories and breaking into the supposedly locked window. Harry has a gun (the stolen gun he’s decided to keep) pointed at him before he’s set so much as an oxford onto the rug.

“What the hell are you doing?” Harry whispers harshly after lowering his gun when he recognises Eggsy’s profile.

And then he hears a high-pitched yip.

Eggsy pulls something out of a pack that had been strapped to his back and Harry watches as a wriggling furry shape is gently placed on the floor. The creature immediately closes the distance between Eggsy and the bed, leaping sprightly onto it and crawling up the length of Harry’s body to begin maniacally licking his face.

“I knew he’d like you,” Eggsy says as Harry tries to buffer himself from the little dog’s urgent need to personally see to his face wash. “So, he needs a home, and you need a friend. Works out, doesn’t it?”

Harry manages to turn on the light next to him in order to see his furry attacker in further detail. The dog is a tiny, ragged, brown-coated terrier, a vibrating little thing whose tongue is now lapping at the air in the all mighty struggle to make contact with Harry’s skin. “And you thought half three in the morning was the ideal time to drop him off in my room without asking?”

“If I asked, you would have said no just to spite me and yourself,” Eggsy says like he’s being reasonable.

The dog has given up trying to lick Harry’s face off with a huff and has instead settled for curling up into a ball on his stomach, nosing at his palm in hopes of scritches, which Harry finds himself already complying with. “I don’t have time to care for a dog. And this is the Russell’s home. I can’t just bring an animal into it without permission.”

“Kingsman has its own kennels, you know,” Eggsy says as he casually sits on the window sill. “And with all that money that’s just hit your accounts, you can afford a home with a nice yard of your own. Plenty of space for a dog to run about in.”

“You’re incorrigible,” Harry tells him flatly. “And terribly transparent. If you think money or a new eye or a dog can buy me….”

“The dog’s yours either way,” Eggsy says. “So’s the money, and even the new eye if you want it.”

“...why?”

“It’s the least we can do for helping us save the world. It would have been significantly more difficult had you not been with me. More people would have died.”

Harry leans down to press his nose into the little dog’s fur, feeling its softness, inhaling its freshly washed canine scent, revelling in the little life curled up close to him. The dog raises its head and starts trying to lick his face again. “Fine,” he says.

“Fine?” Eggsy echoes, brow furrowing. “Fine, as in...you’re taking the job?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well...great.” Harry hides his smirk at Eggsy’s bafflement tone in the dog’s fur, giving him a full body rub down that has the creature practically melting in bliss. “Guess I’ll...go tell Merlin then.”

“Hopefully at a more reasonable hour than what you think are mine.”

“Actually, about now _is_ a reasonable hour for Merlin.”

Harry looks up and sees that Eggsy hardly looks inclined to start moving. “Is that all you wanted?”

There’s a long moment of silence fuelled by hesitation. “Do you think...I know we didn’t get off to the best start...but do you ever think about…” Eggsy bites his lip. “What it would be like if we had met under normal circumstances? If I had approached you in the club with no ulterior motives other than to get in your pants? If we had our day together. And then I rung you up again, and we had another day after that? Maybe a night too. And another, and another still?”

“No,” Harry lies and then further cements it with the truth. “I don’t like to dwell on the things that could have been. I only know what was and now exists.”

What was: Eggsy lied to Harry for perhaps very good reasons. He had let himself become too vulnerable, too open to Eggsy’s promises. He let himself get deceived because he had wanted to believe in the lie. It was dangerous and stupid of him, and it could have led to a disastrous outcome had Eggsy poor intentions.

What now exists: He can’t let it happen again, and not just for himself. If he was to be a leader of a spy agency, Eggsy’s boss no less, then he had to be the most cautious and inaccessible of them all.

It’s a clear enough refusal and dismissal in one. Even Eggsy understands it for what it is as Harry watches his face shut down and smooth out into perfect, attractive neutrality. “Then I’ll let Merlin know your decision. I imagine it will take some time to smooth things over with the Russells.”

“Yes,” Harry agrees, not looking forward to the hysterical scene he is sure to face when he informs them of his decision to leave. “But they’ll be in good hands. I’ll personally see to it, now that I have the resources to assure as much.”

“Very good, sir,” Eggsy says, a ghost of a smile painting his mouth in the dark before he straightens up and swings a leg back out the window. Just before he disappears out of view entirely, he gives Harry an absurd bow, hand fisted to his heart, head dipped low. “Long live the king.”

Harry sits back against the headboard, snugly hugging his new companion to his chest, trying not to feel crushed under the weight of the burden now thrust upon his shoulders.

 

_____

 

“Double-breasted, I think,” Andrew says as he cinches the fabric at the small of Harry’s back to create a slim fitting waistline in the mirror. “On some men, it would make them look stocky, even barrel chested, but you have the ideal proportions to carry it off well.”

The are panels of navy pinstriped fabric pinned together across Harry’s frame like a quilt. Not precisely the most elegant stage of a bespoke suit, but Harry can see the bones of it coming together, how it flatters his figure, narrowing his waist and broadening his shoulders in a manner that far exceeds what minute customisations he ever did to his own cheaper garments. He thinks about Eggsy swaggering across a room, undoubtedly feeling about as cool and confident as he had looked in a suit like this.

“Thank you, Andrew,” Harry says. “I trust your opinion on the matter.”

“I won’t steer you wrong, sir,” Andrew assures him. “It’s your coronation, after all.”

Harry stifles a grimace. Despite a world that is still struggling in the wake of V-Day and Kingsman left in shambles (fifty percent of the table dead or presumed as much), there must still be the pomp and circumstance of an official swearing-in ceremony. Harry would have been happier to have had the whole thing done behind closed doors with the minimum number of witnesses required.

“The ceremony isn’t for you,” Merlin had told him when he dared to bring the matter up. “It’s for everyone else in the agency to assure them they are in good hands and that the agency carries on. There is comfort and trust in the familiarity of tradition, especially when trust is now at an all-time low. Think on that the next time you want to roll your eyes.”

Thoroughly chastened, he learns to bite his tongue.

He was handed the clearances and passcodes to Chester’s office the very morning after his verbal acceptance of the position as if Merlin couldn’t be rid of the burden swiftly enough. After a curious perusal of all of Kingsman’s records dating back to its foundation, Harry can now understand why.

Kingsman is immense agency with vast resources and an all-pervasive degree of power that is frighteningly easy to abuse: the wrong word in the right ear could topple nations. By all rights, no one ought to have that much power. Certainly not him.

And yet, now he does.

What does it say about him that the first thing he uses his newfound position of authority on is to read Eggsy’s record?

Harry tries to justify it to himself as levelling the playing field. Eggsy knows almost everything about him, both official and not, and he can’t presume to hold any modicum of authority when he feels so vulnerable.

Eggsy had been more or less telling the truth: his history hasn’t been buried and wouldn’t be difficult to excavate to anyone with a few investigative skills, even without Kingsman’s extensive access. Son of a previous Kingsman candidate who had died during the trials. Arrested for auto theft and given an eighteen-month prison sentence at age twenty. Approached by James Spencer, the Lancelot prior to Roxanne Morton, three months into his sentence and invited into the Galahad trials in exchange for early release. Beat out eleven other candidates to earn the title and has been working as an agent ever since. Prior to that, a brief stint in Marines training and then a long and colourful record of various arrests for everything from vandalisation and petty theft to the selling of drugs and solicitation.

As predicted, even that dry account of how an impoverished boy like Eggsy could end up among the elite ranks of Kingsman feels like he's only getting a part of the picture.

What he was expecting, he doesn’t know. Perhaps all the answers to the ever-troubling question of _why_. Some panacea or telling piece of evidence that will unravel all the uncertainties, make everything clear for him and allow him to bloody get on with it.

 

_____

 

The ceremony is just as dreadful as he had been anticipating. The shop is closed for the day. Every knight who is still alive and able-bodied is present in the dining room, and their glasses’ feeds transmit the entire event to Kingsman’s offices all over the world. There is a gravity to the proceedings, more so, Harry suspects because of who he is, where he has come from, and what he is coming _into_.

Merlin holds out the very old and surprisingly very plain sword, appropriately named Excalibur, for Harry to lay his hand upon its hilt whilst he speaks the sacred oath to protect and cherish all life. Loyalty and service unto his knights and civilians alike. To conduct himself with honour, chivalry, and grace so that he might be upheld as the foremost example of all Kingsman’s values. He feels only just a little silly while doing so.

But as he speaks, his gaze travels around the table, trying to imprint on each face. They may not all trust him yet, but these are his knights now, and he is sworn to protect and guide them.

Lancelot, their newest and already one of their best. Lost her sponsor and uncle, Percival, when Valentine personally killed him in Kentucky. Eggsy’s best friend. They work well together and he’s made a note to pair them for missions as frequently as possible.

Gawain. Irish. A chemist by training. Divorced. One son. Accomplished violinist.

Kay. Cambridge. Former RAF. Card shark. Allergic to alcohol though he rarely lets that stop him.

Tristan, fourth son of the previous Duke of Norfolk. Bedivere, who is older than even Harry himself.

Galahad, who sits at Arthur’s right hand. Chester must have hated that.

The conclusion of the ceremony ends with each knight swearing their fealty to their new king. It involves an embarrassing show of going down to one knee before him and placing a hand on Excalibur’s hilt alongside Harry’s.

Bedivere doesn’t quite look him in the eye. Harry suspects he will seek to test Harry at every turn. His respect will be difficult to earn.

Eggsy, the little shit, swears his loyalty over the sword in a solemnly reverent tone while his thumb covertly draws tingling circles along the inside of Harry’s palm where no one else can see and concludes his oath with a quick wink.

 

_____

 

Despite _tradition_ , he has Chester’s office almost completely torn down and renovated. Gone are the dark hulking wood panels, rich Persian area rug, stuffed leather chairs, and the massive oak desk. A part of him could see the appeal of such classic trappings, but for the most part, he can’t be bothered.

In its place are more streamlined, contemporary furnishings that only Merlin seems to approve of. There is more empty space, more light admitted into the room and, most importantly, more room to think. His one allowance is to keep Chester’s private library, though the hardbound books now sit on sleeker shelves.

There are also several small beds and toys littered around the room to give his new dog every possible comfort, more so than even his own, and when Eggsy sees this, he nearly laughs himself sick. Of course, as is the way of small dogs, the only place he wants to sit is in Harry's lap, which Harry is admittedly charmed by.

“So you haven’t even given him a name yet, even though you’ve bought every dog toy on the market and all your suits are covered in enough dog hair to make Andrew weep,” Eggsy remarks as he sprawls in one of the chairs opposite the desk. They’ve been intentionally designed to be as uncomfortable as possible to discourage visitors from staying too long, but Eggsy doesn’t seem to betray any sense of discomfort.

Harry pauses in the financial report he had been reading to give Eggsy a mildly annoyed look, and then to glance down at said creature currently draped haphazardly across his thighs, snuffling in his sleep. “He’ll get a name when the time is right.”

“And what time will that be then?”

“When I get a better sense of who he is.”

“It’s a dog, Harry, not a baby. A name isn’t going to define its destiny.”

“Were you this overly-familiar with Chester when he was your superior?”

“Why do you think he hated me so much?” Eggsy grins.

“I should think it was for a number of reasons.”

“Yeah, well, it was _one_ of the reasons, then. But you’re already worlds better than him.”

It’s not necessarily much of a compliment given what low regard Chester is now held in, but it’s enough, at least, to allow Harry to return back to his work without further comment.

“Besides, I didn’t sleep with Chester. My god, can you imagine?”

He slaps the paper back down on the desk, startling his dog into rousing its head and giving Harry a baleful look. “Galahad, go be somewhere else.”

“Alright, alright.” Eggsy raises his hands harmlessly as he moves to stand. “Leaving now, sir.”

Harry suspects he is wholly unrepentant.

 

_____

 

He’s in and out of consciousness several times before it finally sticks, and even then it takes all of his stubborn will to stay awake. He hates the feeling of clawing his way back from forced unconsciousness for the precious few moments it takes to assure himself that he is safe. His head feels stuffed with cotton, not quite attached to the rest of his body. He’s freezing and terribly thirsty. He reflexively opens his eye and feels a sharp ache in his left socket where something feels... _there_ now. It’s unpleasant. He’s halfway to raising a hand to wipe the irritation away before he remembers.

“You did good, Harry,” Eggsy says from somewhere to his right. “Merlin says surgery went very well. Thirsty?”

Harry turns his head just enough to pull a blurry semblance of Eggsy into his line of sight. He doesn’t feel like his head moves all that much when he tries to nod but Eggsy seems to understand anyway, holding up a cup of lukewarm water with a straw to his lips.

“How do you feel?” Eggsy asks when he takes the half empty cup away.

Throat now moistened, he can at least concentrate on all the other numerous discomforts that clamour for his attention. After a long moment of indecision, he finally croaks out, “Like I just got shot in the head.”

“Well, this one’s going to have a better outcome, I promise,” Eggsy assures.

Eggsy’s features slowly come into clarity. Soft green eyes, chewed upon red lips, sharp cheekbones and jaw. He’s not sure why Eggsy is here with him now in the aftermath of his eye surgery or how long he’d been waiting, but the sincerity of his expression, no, _concern_ makes the anxious fluttering in his chest settle.

 

_____

 

“Exactly how much more testing will there be?” Harry asks, his voice betraying his impatience.

“As much as until I am satisfied your eye works correctly and won’t malfunction at a critical time and, say, overheat and melt your brain,” Merlin answers without missing a beat. On the distant screen, new letters appear on the eye chart. “Start at the top and read your way down until you physically cannot anymore.”

Harry dutifully covers his right eye and squints at the chart for a moment. Arching a brow at Merlin, he reads off, “F, U, C, K, U, C, U, N—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Merlin grumbles, stabbing at his tablet to swiftly vanish the chart. “I’m still trying to figure out how he’s bloody getting into my systems, that cheeky little bastard….”

In spite of himself, Harry has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.

 

_____

 

The incisions heal. The swelling recedes. The last of the kinks are worked out.

After all is said and done, when he looks at himself in the mirror, it is like seeing an old acquaintance after several years.

The expectations he had of himself are disrupted by reality. He had got used to what he could only term a haggard creature worn down to the bone, perhaps only held together by sheer stubbornness. The scars on his face were a spiderweb of pale pink ridges. The eye patch he wore always made him seem stern and gristled. Even intimidating in the right circumstances.

Now he sees a man with nearly symmetrical if unextraordinary features. There are still the ever deepening lines of age. The sagging. Still the softening of once sharper angles, the enlarged droop of the once delicate features of his youth. But two brown eyes look back at him, set in a sea of, if not entirely unscarred, then certainly less damaged skin. And even the faint pink irritated laser lines would fade in time.

The change is terrifying at first. For so long, he had looked into the mirror and only saw honed purpose and will. Now, he sees himself: a man whose eyes shine with too many emotions and too much longing in his heart. How so much could be transmitted through something that was glass, metal, and wiring, he does not know.

A man with hope. It’s a dangerous thing.

 

_____

 

“You know,” Eggsy huffs as he practically drops the box he’s carried through the door instead of gently setting it down, “They have people you can pay to do this sort of thing. Pretty sure you could have used the company card on this one too.”

“Nonsense. I hardly have enough possessions to warrant professional movers,” Harry dismisses. “Besides, you rather eagerly volunteered for this if I do recall.”

Eggsy can’t really argue either point, so instead he says, “You could have just taken up one of the many homes Chester left to you, though I do appreciate how you donated them to the government to be turned into orphanages. That ought to have King rightfully spinning in his grave.”

“I barely had enough to fill a studio flat. I hardly know what to do with the space I’ll have now as it is.” His newly purchased townhouse is hardly palatial, nowhere near the grandiose level of the many properties Harry had found himself the owner of upon inheriting his godfather’s entire veritable empire, but it’s still far larger than anything he has ever lived in for the majority of his life where his only requirements had been that it provided adequate shelter from the elements and he could abandon it quickly as necessary.

Now he has a full kitchen with top of the line appliances that beckon him to do more than simply reheat last night’s takeaway. He has a master bedroom with a master bath, a room he’ll turn into his office, and even still one left over to turn into a guest, not that he has ever once had one. He has a modestly sized enclosed back garden within which he can let his dog roam free.

He has a _home_ again.

Harry sits down on top of a box, because now he’s got to actually think about investing in some quality furniture, and stares up at the blank white walls awaiting adornment. “Did you feel like this when you moved into your house after joining Kingsman?”

“If you mean feeling overwhelmed and grateful that I could give my baby sister and mum a place to grow and thrive away from my bastard ex-stepfather, then...yeah. Yeah, I did.” Eggsy rubs the back of his neck and takes a seat on top of another box, mirroring Harry. “Mostly, I just felt relieved.”

“You do this for your family, don’t you?” Harry asks, though he realises as soon as he says the words that it’s not so much a question as it is an assertion.

“I mean...don’t get me wrong. I love most of what I do. I love the excitement, even the danger. Turns out, I’m pretty good at it,” Eggsy says with a diffident shrug of his shoulders. “But there’ve been times when the only thing that got me through a mission was thinking of them. It’s good to have that kind of guiding light. Helps see you through the darkness sometimes.”

Harry has never realised how brittle Eggsy’s smile can be at times.

“For a long time, mine was spite,” Harry admits. “But then, much to my surprise, it became true satisfaction. Maybe even, in brief passing moments, joy.” At the end of a successful mission, exhausted and high off the adrenaline, coming across an apricot orchard with the sweetest fruit he had ever tasted, made more intoxicating when gleaned from another’s tongue in the dry heat. All that light. Utter incandescence, until it was extinguished, snuffed out so quickly in but the blink of an eye. “I suppose for a long time, I had lost myself.”

“And now?” Eggsy prompts, seemingly hanging on to every word.

“And now….” The words are there, but he can’t seem to push them out. Harry sighs, mentally retreating from that precipice. He taps his foot on the wooden floorboards just to hear the sound echo within so much empty space. “...dog beds. I’m going to need at least one for every room in the house.”

“ _At least_?”

“Well, it’s good to have choices, is it not?”

Eggsy stares at him strangely. “If I had known you would get this attached, I’d have rethought the idea of bribing you with a dog in the first place.”

 

_____

 

He always expected he would have trouble with Bedivere one day, but he didn’t think shit would hit the fan at such a critical juncture. Even Merlin is looking askance at the brazenness an agent would dare display against Arthur.

“If you wipe out that cell, Bedivere, you will have turned the whole village against the very forces trying to take back that region,” Harry grounds out over the comms. On the monitors before him, he gets a first-person view of what Bedivere sees: a whole compound housing one of the nastier terrorist groups to have sprung back from V-Day, currently relaxing after a long day of transporting a stolen nuclear warhead to a new location. “Keep to your orders. Neutralise the warhead and get out unseen.”

“With all due respect, _sir_ ,” comes the barely civil voice, “We can deliver a harsh blow to this organisation right now. We’ll never have a chance like this again. I am recommending we take it.”

“I don’t care what your short sighted recommendations are,” Harry says sharply, gaze rapt upon the screen where Bedivere is hovering close, _too close_ , to the men. “I know this region and I know these people. If they even suspect it was a Western plot to undermine the only group to have offered them food and water and medical aid after last week’s flash floods, you’ll have singularly destroyed years of progress in the region. Do you understand?”

The ensuing silence is of a decidedly resentful flavour.

“I asked if you understood, Bedivere,” Harry repeats.

“Understood, sir,” comes the clipped reply.

“Good,” Harry says, feeling some of the tension in his shoulders bleed away. “And Bedivere? If you ever question my orders like that again, I’ll have you put on reconnaissance duty for the next five years or until you’re driven to retire. Whichever comes first.”

The reply comes much more quickly this time. “Yes, sir.”

“Brutal, but effective,” Merlin remarks once the comms are muted, giving Harry an appraising look filled with newfound respect. “I approve.”

 

_____

 

Sometimes, though, he sits on the other end of those comms to oversee a particularly difficult mission, and feels utterly helpless.

The pained, wet breaths that fill the silence of his office are horrible to hear. The transmitted view on his screen wavers and jerks, like his agent cannot quite walk with an even gait in a straight line. He is safe and comfortable in his office, a king secure within his domain, and thousands of miles away, Eggsy, his soldier on the battlefield, is dying.

“Reached...extraction point,” Eggsy gasps out. On the screen, his glasses bring into view a rocky outpost with a flat enough surface just wide enough to support a helicopter. “How long?”

“Fourteen hours at least, lad,” Merlin says. There’s a note of frustration and regret in his voice because it’s very likely Eggsy will have bled out by then.

Eggsy must know it too. “Oh good. Enough time to catch up on...sleep.”

Harry watches as Eggsy manages to wedge himself into a small crawlspace beneath an overhanging slab to afford himself some shelter, then glances down to a hand covered in bright red blood.

He’s suddenly seeing his own hands pressing at the bubbling fount of Jalwan’s abdomen uselessly, blood seeping up between his fingers, looking into wild eyes filled with pain and fear, and trying to project calm.

_It’s alright. It’s not that bad. You’re doing so well. You’re going to be okay. You did so well, and I love you so much, did you know that?_

Harry swallows thickly and rubs the ridge of his left eye. “Please keep putting pressure on that.”

Eggsy groans and Harry is given a plain view of the rocky ceiling. “Jesus, think I’m soaked through. Fuck, got me real good, didn’t he?”

“Lie down. Lie on your back, at an angle.” Some distant part of him marvels at the steadiness in his tone, but the medical professional within him will always look to the problem first before the person. “Can you brace yourself against the rock?”

Harry watches Eggsy’s legs dragging themselves through the dirt as he shifts around. There’s a sharp, agonising cry that he thinks may just very well haunt him for nights to come and then Eggsy’s panting and swearing up a storm. “Fuck! Oh, fuck me.”

“Are you on your back?” he insists.

“Jesus, yes. Yes, I’m there and it blows,” Eggsy growls. Good. Harry would rather him angry and alive. “Well, now that I’ve got time on my hands. Who’s up for a game of _I Spy_?”

“Remember your training,” Merlin says. “You need to conserve your energy.”

“So rest now,” Harry adds. “Though I must insist on you waking up at periodic intervals.”

“You were supposed to be the nicer Arthur.” Then, in more wavering tones, “Will you still be here when I wake up?”

There’s an almost childlike quality to the question. Something in Harry’s chest clenches painfully. He wants to throw something in anger. He wants to drain a bottle of scotch. “Yes, I’ll always be here. I promise.”

 

_____

 

“Do you remember that day?” Harry suddenly asks because it’s been a long time since he’s had to pull an all-nighter and now it’s a concerted effort to keep himself awake as well. “That day we spent together?”

“...course,” Eggsy replies cautiously, then huffs out a sound of bittersweet laughter. “Fulfilled some of my hottest pornographic fantasies, it did. Really replenished the spank bank on that one.”

“You once invited me to ask you anything, remember?”

“And you didn’t take me up on it. I think somewhere deep down you knew I was playing you. You were so intuitive like that. I had to be careful. Always had to use the truth.”

 _I like you a lot, Harry_. “Well, I’m asking you now.”

“Now?” There’s an echo of incredulity in Eggsy’s faint voice.

“Yes, now,” Harry says. “I want to know how and why you became a...tailor.”

Eggsy laughs shakily. “James. James showed up in prison. Told me my dad once saved his life. They’d been rivals for the job, actually, and then my dad took himself out of the running by throwing himself on top of a grenade to save everyone else. So give or take fifteen years, another spot opens up and James remembers my dad. Remembers he had a son who might just be about the right age, and if he’s got half the courage, half the potential Lee had...well.”

James, the Lancelot before Roxy. James, who had been Alistair’s, the previous Percival’s, partner. Alistair, who died in Kentucky after being induced by Valentine’s SIM card into slaughtering a church full of people.

“He was the only person in the world who believed I could be something more than what I was,” Eggsy whispers. “Then he was killed in Argentina by Valentine, turns out. And then Ali died in Kentucky. Thought Rox was gonna just bomb that mountain straight out until it weren’t nothing but a pile of rubble. You’ll never know...never know how much I wanted them dead. Still do. Prison don’t feel like enough sometimes.”

“Death wouldn’t be enough either,” Harry tells him. “Take it from someone who has loved and lost and killed for it.”

“Guess we’ll never know now. Never know a lot of things, probably.”

 

_____

 

“Harry.” Eggsy’s voice is so faint, Harry would wonder if he half-imagined it if Eggsy hadn’t said it again. “Harry.”

“You’re doing very well, Eggsy. Just five more hours. That’s all.”

“Do you think...do you think we could’ve been friends? At least eventually?”

Harry closes his eyes and clenches his teeth together so hard, he may very well have cracked a tooth.

“Harry.”

“Harry.”

“...yes, Eggsy. Yes, I think we would have been the very greatest of friends.”


	4. Chapter 4

Six hours later, Harry hears the distant, distinct drill of the chopper’s rotors through the comms, followed swiftly by Merlin’s confirmation: rescue has arrived, delayed by headwinds. As to whether or not it’s become a body recovery mission remains to be seen.

Eggsy stopped responding to Harry over five hours ago, his feed only showing a static image of the stone ceiling above.

Harry finds himself in an oddly liminal state, hovering between the knowing and not, dreading the inevitable certainty, one way or the other. There is a part of him, old and weary and too long since exposed to loss, that has traced the words of this familiar refrain before and is already shutting down, bracing for impact.

And there is a part of him he didn’t even know was blossoming that feels raw and newly burned. The unexpectedly sharp pain of it takes his breath away. He curls in on himself in his chair, wrapping his arms around his middle, trying to breathe through it.

The helicopter approaches with a deafening herald. There is a flicker of movement on the screen, faces appear, alien at first with their helmets still down, and then slowly revealing themselves as they peer down at Eggsy in concern. Harry can see their hands moving but little else, barely able to make out their words through the continuous whop of air.

“Helo Four,” Merlin says, “Can you confirm agent status?”

There’s another exchange of voices drowned out beneath the rotors and then one of the team members shuts the visor of her helmet and comes in more clearly. “Galahad is still alive, I repeat, Galahad is still alive.”

Harry closes his eyes and drops his head to his chest, and were it not for the fact he was already sitting, he might very well have found himself bowed over on the floor.

“Vitals are weak,” she continues. “Severe haemorrhaging from a puncture wound near the left kidney. Bagging now and prepping for transport. He’ll need immediate blood transfusions.”

“Blood type?” Harry says, finally finding the wherewithal to speak.

“B-negative,” Merlin reports before cursing softly under his breath. “Of course he would have. Nearest facilities are in Bucharest, but there’s no B type in stock, and they’ve got limited supplies of O-neg. V-Day wiped us out across the board and it’s been difficult to resupply.”

“I’m O-negative. I can take the jet and get there in under two hours,” Harry says.

“Well, never let it be said you haven’t bled for this organisation,” Merlin sighs, hesitating for but a split second before settling firmly on a decision. “Alright, I’ll have the jet prepped. Wheels up in fifteen. If we hurry, we might even have the leeches drain you dry before the chopper touches down.”

 

_____

 

When they were ambushed, and Jalwan died beneath his blood soaked hands, Harry still can’t recall the ensuing minutes in the aftermath. It’s only Jalwan’s last expression that he remembers, and then nothing but darkness.

From what he was told, he had picked up a gun and steadily picked off each enemy firing at them until a sniper managed to take him out, but not before Harry’s last bullet also took him down in turn, clearing the scene for the rest of the team to rush him off to medical aid, gas pedal to the floor for six hours straight over bumpy, unpaved dirt roads until they reached the first outpost of civilisation. Against all odds, he should have died.

But he didn’t.

Merlin is as good as his word and Harry lands in Bucharest in almost exactly one hundred minutes. He is promptly whisked off to Kingsman’s private facilities not far from the airstrip, a needle is inserted into his veins, and his blood is slowly being drained into bags in preparation for Eggsy’s arrival less than twenty minutes after that.

He’s had every moment of Eggsy’s tenuous transport fed through his glasses, his stomach dropping every time a shrill alarm breaks out when Eggsy’s vitals crash, his aching jaw clenched each time he is barely brought back.

He’s finally released from the whole tortuous cycle when a nurse shoves a glass of juice into his hand and informs him that the helicopter has arrived.

After that, he is relegated to a kind of purgatory, knowing better than to insert himself where he would be more hindrance than help. But he’s familiar enough with emergency procedures to know that Eggsy will need to be stabilised first before being brought into exploratory surgery to repair the damage done, and throughout it all, there is the interminable wait.

So he does what has always brought him comfort in difficult times: he nicks a handle of cheap and truly medically inadvisable whisky from the bottom drawer of someone’s desk and heads up to the roof.

Bucharest lies somewhat further south of where Kingsman’s facilities are, only appearing as a mass of glittering lights in the darkness. In the span of his own personal history, he’s only ever visited there, properly, just once, far back in the days of the Soviet era. He only remembers it as an old place that temporarily reawoke the scholar in him, amused and appalled by the gaudy odes to communism, charmed by its beautiful old churches that felt like a testament to the belief of God in the details, still managing to hold on to all of their solemn reverence.

But what he had loved the most were the boys like him he had met who bore the scars of survival in their eyes and easy charm on their lips, just as happy to empty his pockets as they were to warm his bed.

One could say, perhaps, he had a type.

 

_____

 

In the end, it’s almost absurdly underwhelming. Eggsy’s veins are replenished with Harry’s blood and he loses a kidney, but the knife just missed knicking the bowel and his body remains free of sepsis. They can even fly back home to England in a few days time.

When Harry finally gets to see Eggsy, he is mostly conscious, and still so pale. Dark bruises shadow his eyes, far diminished from his usual vitality and would be for some time yet.

But he is alive.

“I liked that kidney,” Eggsy moans, barely able to crack his eyes open. “His name was George.”

“You named your kidneys,” Harry says blankly.

“Yeah. Name all my bits. The other one is Fred. Guess I gotta change them around.”

“You have a strange preoccupation with naming things.”

“Gotta name names. There’s power in a name.”

“You’re ridiculous sometimes, you know that?”

Eggsy smiles dosily and closes his eyes, but then, he is on very strong painkillers, so allowances must be made for incoherency, at the very least. “You can’t speak to me like that. We’re friends now.”

Harry presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose, soothing the mildly irritated skin beneath the rims of his glasses for having worn them too long. “In spite of your best attempt to wring every last ounce of blood from your body, that is what you remember.”

“Remember you never left me alone,” Eggsy says, eyes slitting open again. “It helped. Wasn’t so scared of dying anymore.” 

“Well,” Harry says after several stops and starts. “I made a promise, did I not?”

“You keep your promises. It’s one of the things I like about you,” Eggsy says, and the dopey grin is back, briefly, before it transforms into an almost grotesque frown. “Not me. I’m a liar. I lie all the time now. I break promises. I didn’t used to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“I think you’re drugged up to your eyeballs and need to rest,” Harry tells him. “Then when you’re stronger, we can go back to England.”

“We’re not in England?” A furrow appears in Eggsy’s brow, all traces of his earlier upset now vanished from his rather elastic expression. “Where the bloody hell are we then? How are you here?”

“Go to sleep, Eggsy.”

 

_____

 

“Thank you for seeing me, Harry. I know you...you don’t owe me anything, certainly not your time,” says the refined and elegant older woman who sits at the restaurant table across from him and nurses a gin and tonic between her ringed fingers.

His mother is still a stunning woman, Harry thinks, even though he hasn’t laid eyes upon her in over thirty years. She can afford to be, but there was always something naturally youthful in her manner. She’s older now, of course, with more lines and sagging and white hair, but her blue eyes still sparkle like sea glass and her smile, even just a pale imitation of it now, could be considered a rare gift of loveliness akin the sun bestowing its rays from behind a parting cloud. Needless to say, his looks took more after his father.

But his father had married her for her pedigree first and foremost, and then her lovely features second, though he didn’t so much appreciate the sharper intellect that lay behind them. Those were different times back then, however. His mother had learned to hold her tongue and stamp out her own desires at the expense of her relationship with her only child and sense of self.

Harry pities her for that, but he still can’t bring himself to entirely forgive her.

“I assumed that if you wanted to reach out to me after three decades of silence,” he tells her, “there must be a good reason behind it.”

“Your father is dead,” his mother says bluntly, knowing she needed to get straight to the point lest she test his limited patience. “He was killed during V-Day, bludgeoned to death with a brass candle holder by the housekeeper. Reads a bit too much like Cluedo, doesn’t it?”

Harry blinks. He had last heard his father had been wheelchair-bound for some years now and rather frail. It wouldn’t have been particularly difficult for a strong woman even fifteen or so years younger to have taken him out, rage-induced strength or no.

“We didn’t have those SIM cards, but Mrs Thomas did. After some thirty years of nearly flawless service too. She was quite devastated by what she’d done. Promptly quit, of course. I offered her a letter of reference, but I admit...I was relieved to see her go.”

“Understandably,” Harry says.

“I know you two didn’t...well, yours was not the best relationship. Your father had everything going to your cousin after I passed, but then he died too. One of the ones who sided with Valentine. He had no children.”

He hadn’t known that either, but then, what little bits of news he heard about his family tended to happen only through coincidence from still being remotely attached to similar circles.

“So, in light of having no further direct heirs,” his mother continues, “I’ve worked with our solicitor to put you back into the inheritance. I know Mr King left you everything in his will as well and you don’t really need it, but...I feel happier knowing everything is back in its rightful place.”

Harry reaches out to pluck his teacup from its saucer, taking a bracing sip. He needs that moment to think. “You’re right in the assertion that I don’t need your money. I also don’t particularly want it, either.”

“I know, Harry, I...it’s a very pale attempt to right a past wrong.”

“It was never about the will. Not everything is about money. I’m still a gay man, for one.”

“I am aware,” his mother says testily. “But there were different attitudes back then. We didn’t really know much about your kind. And then there was AIDS crisis, Harry. It was wrong, of course, but you must understand. We feared what we didn’t know.”

“You hated what you didn’t know,” he corrects. “About _my kind_.”

“I never hated you. How could I? You’re still my son.”

“You did _nothing_ to stop that man from nearly beating your son to death and then leaving him to fend for himself.”

“I asked, I _begged_ , for Mr King to help you, but you turned your back on him too!”

“I won’t be bought!” Harry snaps, voice rising sharply to where a silence falls over the rest of the restaurant. Aware of the sudden attention they’ve garnered, he swallows and tries to will himself to calm down. “I won’t be backed into a corner. I won’t be forced. I won’t be manipulated. Men like that have shown their hand and look where it’s got them. Do you understand? Keep your money.”

“It’s not about the money, you’re right. I’m sorry, Harry,” his mother says quietly in the wake of his anger. “I am very sorry for all the things I have done and let happen simply because I was too weak-willed to stop them. If you won't accept your inheritance, then please at least know I will never forgive myself for what happened to you.”

“Why?” Harry asks thickly. “Why are you coming to me with this now?”

“Your father is—was a difficult man. He wasn’t nice. He was a monster towards you,” she acknowledges in her frank manner. “But I still loved him for all his many faults. Whatever that says about me, I’m not sure it even matters. His death has put things in perspective for me. Loss seems to affect people in two ways. They either seek to cut off all ties with anything else they can possibly lose or cling to them more tightly than ever. For too long, I have lived as the former, and my life has been impoverished for it. I don’t want to do that anymore, Harry. I don’t want to lose you again.”

His mother is a prideful woman. He knows it must have taken a lot for her to admit even that much. He also knows very well how his personality, if not his looks, were cut from his mother’s cloth with his tendency towards burning bridges and never looking back, but life, at times, is terribly cyclical. Lately, he’s been finding himself coming back around to familiar places and faces only to discover that while many things have not changed, he can still be surprised.

“I don’t know how to allow you back into my life,” he admits, and is also surprised to learn that her pained reaction before she can mask it hurts him. Perhaps he, too, no longer wants to live like that anymore. “But I can try. I’m willing to try. That is all I can promise you for now.”

“It’s alright. It’s enough.” His mother smiles, and it is still beautiful. Her hand twitches like she is about to stretch it out across the table towards him, but in the end, thinks better of it. Not yet. Maybe someday.

 

_____

 

It’s very early in the morning, but Merlin is still awake and working at his terminal, betraying little, if any, signs of tiredness. By now, Harry isn’t sure if he even sleeps at all and has, once or twice, been tempted to check to see if the man wasn’t actually a robot beneath his poker expression and jumpers.

Before him are a wall of monitors, each depicting something different. There’s a live op in Cambodia with Kay on one screen, a wall of indecipherable code Merlin is working on front and centre, several views of various locations within Kingsman’s estate both at home and abroad, and—

“Is that Eggsy?” Harry leans down to peer closer at the screen, and yes, bathed in the sickly green hues of nighttime vision, he can make out Eggsy’s telltale features currently lax in sleep within one of Kingsman’s quarters. “What is he doing here? I thought he’d want to go home for his convalescence.”

Merlin doesn’t even stop typing. “Eggsy’s mother and sister think he’s a very in-demand international tailor. It would be difficult to explain why a business trip to Italy resulted in the need for emergency surgery and the removal of a bodily organ. Whenever he incurs a serious injury, Eggsy will tell his family that his trip has been extended for however long it takes for him to visibly recover, or at least until he can think of a plausible explanation for why he’s the world’s unluckiest tailor.”

“That could well extend into months.”

“And it has,” Merlin concurs.

“Close family members have been read in before.” Harry frowns. “Why doesn’t he tell them?”

“That is something you will have to ask him about,” Merlin says.

“Because you don’t know or you won’t tell me?”

“Does it really matter? It wouldn’t be my place either way.” Finally, Merlin turns in his chair to fix him with an unnervingly assessing stare. “You two have been spending a lot of time together.”

In spite of himself, Harry feels the instinctive tension take hold of his body and knows Merlin sees it too. He’s walking right into his trap with eyes wide open and there’s not a bloody thing he can do about it. “He seeks me out. Continuously.”

“And you permit it. You don’t turn him away. You don’t establish professional nor personal boundaries. You stayed with him on the line the whole time he was bleeding out. You were quick to offer up your own blood for him.”

“Get to the point.”

Merlin raises his hands. “I don’t have a point. I just find it interesting that you still allow the young man who seduced you and lied to you to remain close to you still. I’ve studied your profile. It’s not in your nature to easily forgive and forget.”

“So why did you give me the Arthur position if you think there’s a possibility I could, what? Play the long game in order to eventually retaliate?” Harry asks.

“Because a young man could seduce you and lie to you and yet you still let him remain close,” Merlin says, lips twisting into what may very well be a smile, though Harry isn’t entirely sure. “That, and I saw how you vehemently reacted to King’s offer when he made it to you.”

“Offer?”

“Ah. You wouldn’t remember it, would you?” Merlin twists back around to his terminal and pull up a new video on the monitor closest to Harry’s line of sight. “I found this among King’s encrypted files.”

Harry is disconcerted to see himself looking directly back at him, but it’s him from when he still only had one eye. It must have been from the perspective of someone wearing Kingsman’s glasses.

And then Merlin starts the recording and Harry hears Chester’s voice.

He doesn’t remember any of it happening at all as he watches himself trade barbed words with his godfather and then collapse from an amnesia dart shot into his neck. Not more than twenty seconds later, four men are entering his flat and carrying out his unconscious body, presumably to have transported him to Valentine’s bunker on Chester’s instructions.

Merlin stops the recording after that, and after a beat of silence, Harry says, “The things we do to and for each other in the name of love.”

“You were being offered the world, but you, Harry Hart, are an unusually principled man,” Merlin says.

“It’s not much of a world when most of its people are dead,” Harry points out.

“King didn’t see much value in those people. Had you shared his way of thinking, you wouldn’t have either. So now my only concern at this point really is the affairs of your heart.”

“I don’t see how that’s any concern of yours.”

“It is a concern of mine when it involves people I care about,” Merlin says. “It may not seem like it, but Eggsy is rather tenderhearted. It’s what makes him particularly effective in the art of manipulation.”

“You don’t need to tell me that,” Harry says flatly.

“Eggsy did what he did because I ordered him to,” Merlin says. “Whatever anger you feel from that must also be directed at me.”

“I _was_ angry,” he confesses. “But I’m not angry anymore. I know why you and he did it. I would have done the same were I in that position.”

“And that’s what has me concerned, because you allow him to remain close to you and you will lead him to believe the two of you are friends and he will continue to nurse an admiration, dare I say, _infatuation_ , for you,” Merlin says, pinning Harry with his all-invasive stare. “And yet I believe there will always be a part of you that you will withhold from him. Whether it’s out of principle or wounded pride, I don’t know and don’t particularly care. I care about how this will end and how much I need to prepare for the fallout.”

“Are you...actually asking me what my intentions are towards Eggsy?” Harry asks incredulously.

“He has a bit of mischief in him, you might have gathered, but it’s never malicious,” Merlin says. “When he was a recruit, I worried about the gentleness I saw beneath all those rough edges. I didn’t think he had the stomach for this line of work. Chester even suspected James had helped him cheat on the dog test and spent a lot of time and resources trying to prove it, though he never could. And in the end, it didn’t matter, because Eggsy turned out to be a very good agent. Very good. But it came at a cost. That gentleness, Harry, he’s either buried it very deeply or excised it out of himself. Either one had to be a difficult undertaking. It leaves behind something that doesn’t ever quite heal, does it?” When Merlin looks at Harry, it’s with knowing. “So I only ask that if you must inflict further pain, don’t draw it out. Make it a quick, clean hit so that he may have a chance to recover.”

He thinks about Eggsy’s smile, the true one that makes his eyes almost squint and gleam. The tightly restrained one that is measured and cautious while his eyes look hunted. The mirthless one that makes Harry think that if he didn’t smile then and there, he’d shatter apart. Eggsy has always worn a thin veneer of ease, has always been quick to make a quip or laugh, though the degrees of it vary wildly from joy to the gallows.

“You’re asking me about things even I don’t have an answer for,” Harry admits. “I don’t find it easy to trust, much less when I am asked to trust again. But I...I find myself wanting to and not knowing how.”

“So you were telling your mother the truth after all.”

Harry blinks, slightly taken aback. “You were listening to that? I wasn’t even wearing my glasses.”

“I’m listening in on everything everyone says and does to anyone,” Merlin says, reaching up to peel something from Harry’s shoulder before holding it up for inspection: a bug that is no bigger than a speck of lint. “Our last leader was a traitor. So were several of my agents. Fool me twice. So, I trust, but verify.”

The violated feeling of it crawls up his spine. He hates being taken off guard. “How comforting,” he mutters for lack of anything truly useful to say.

But in the end, there is little use in getting offended or outraged. He did, after all, sign up for this, egregious lack of privacy and all.

 

_____

 

He watches Roxy wail on a punching bag in the gymnasium for a long time before he steps forward and makes his presence known. Her strikes are controlled, powerful, and surgically precise, speaking to years of formal training. She’s a small girl, but he has no doubt she would be a lethally quick opponent in a fight.

“Would you like to spar for a bit?” he asks her.

To her credit, she doesn’t even startle. Maybe she had been aware of him the whole time after all. Instead, she stops and gives him a long, measured look and then warily dips her chin in assent.

They walk over to a wide expanse of hard blue mats, circling around each other. “Thank you. It’s been awhile since I’ve gone against a highly-skilled partner,” he says. “I think this will help me more than it will help you.”

“I can go easier on you, sir,” she says with a knife’s edge smile.

“Please don’t.” 

She doesn’t. When she moves in to strike, she uses her shorter stature to her advantage, coming in swift, smaller hands and feet slipping through his defences to make impact with his ribs, his stomach, even his knee.

“You protect your left side too much. It leaves you off balance,” she tells him as she gives him a hand off the mats.

“Old habits, I’m afraid,” he says, shaking his head at his own foolishness. “Again, please.”

They go another round, and several rounds after that, until he is sweating and aching but his blood is singing in his veins and he remembers how much he enjoys this. Even Roxy is breathing harder as he warms up, starting to learn her style and she his. She still wins far more often than not.

“You want to talk to me about Eggsy,” she states when they take a break, sitting side by side on a bench while taking careful sips of water.

He pauses. “What makes you think that?”

“You’re all _he_ ever talks about,” she says. “The feeling seems mutual.”

“I don’t want to talk about Eggsy. I would rather talk about you.” She doesn’t even tense up, and he admires her control. “Your entrance into Kingsman has been rather traumatic, losing two people close to you.”

If he didn’t know better, he’d say the shrug of her shoulders was apathetic. “It’s a taste of the dangers this life has to offer, is it not?” she says. “Better to learn that now.”

“It’s true a life like this will be filled with loss,” Harry says, “I worry that it has taught you not to trust. Not in this organisation. Not in your fellow agents. Not in me.”

“I knew several of Kingsman’s former agents growing up, even before I ever knew they were Kingsman,” Roxy says, not looking at him so much as the condensation of her water bottle. “Polite gentleman. Well-respected. Treated me well. And then their heads blew up. What is trust built upon? Knowing a person? How well can you ever really know a person? If anything, this life teaches us the answer to that question.” 

“Will you tell me about your uncles?”

It takes her a long time to decide whether to indulge his request or not, but then she begins to speak. “Uncle Ali was my father’s younger brother and a bit of a black sheep in that he suddenly decided he was going to be a tailor, travel all over the world, and take up domestic life with another man. Everyone in my family paid significant attention to my older brother given that he was the heir to the family fortune, but not Uncle Ali. He knew what it was like to be the spare himself.”

As she speaks, Harry watches her eyes soften.

“Nobody in my family knew what to do with a girl who didn’t want to shut up and look pretty and only go to school to get a good husband, so Uncle Ali often stepped in. I spent most of my teenage years in his and James’s company more than my own parents’. Theirs was a life I aspired to. There was no question as to what they meant to each other or me to them. Somehow, _they_ were secure in knowing their purpose in life, and their work brought them great satisfaction. It’s more than most people get.”

Her life, in many ways, paralleled his own, though everything about her manner now suggests Alistair Morton was, by nature, a kinder, more nurturing man than his godfather had been.

“How do you know they felt that way?” he asks. “How do two spies build a life together given how little they could trust it?”

“I…” Roxy stops and frowns. “I don’t know. Trust has to start somewhere. Someone has to make the conscious choice and pray it isn’t misplaced. The definition of the word, I suppose.”

“We’re all of us very good at assessing the risks. Why even bother if the odds are so against us?”

“Because,” Roxy says softly, “if there is a chance to be happy, then I suppose even a spy would take that risk.”

“You’re an excellent agent, Lancelot, and I think your uncles would have been proud to have seen what you’ve accomplished,” Harry tells her as he stands up and starts for the showers. “But when it came to certain matters, I’m afraid I’ve played it rather too risk averse. It’s a lonely life. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.”

 

_____

 

The sun sinks lower in the sky and it creates a diffused golden light across the yard, stretching long shadows from the young trees he planted. The heavy heat of summer makes Harry feel heavy and sleepy, and only the insects that enjoy tickling his skin keep him from closing his eyes and letting himself fall into a lazy slumber.

That, and the frenetic energy of two small dogs running wild circles around him, barking madly, joined in by Eggsy’s hooting and cackling as they chase and tumble over each other in order to get to the ball Eggsy’s tosses.

“Christ, JB, you’re so fucking lazy,” Eggsy grumbles when his pug makes the sudden decision to simply plop down in the centre of the lawn and pant up at them. “Look! Look at him go! You’re really going to let a dog named Mr Pickle get the best of you? What kind of dog are you? Have you no pride?”

Hearing his name, Mr Pickle happily comes trotting up to them, ball wedged into his mouth, tail wagging back and forth furiously.

“There’s nothing wrong with his name,” Harry says, yanking the slobbery thing from his dog’s mouth and rearing his arm back to toss the ball as far as he can throw it without it sailing over his neighbour’s wall and being lost forever. His tireless little dog shoots off after it.

“You spent months—months!—waiting, telling me you ‘needed to see what kind of dog he was, Eggsy,’ ‘it’s very important, Eggsy,’ ‘you can’t just pick a name without some serious thought behind it.’” Eggsy’s impression of him is rather uncanny. “All that, and what you come up with is _Mr Pickle_? Really?”

“Says the man who named his pug _Jack Bauer_.”

“I’m at least keeping to a theme here.”

“Oh shut up.”

“And you call me ridiculous.” Eggsy grins at him, hazy in a streak of sun that makes his hair glow and his skin shine with a thin sheen of perspiration, arrestingly and devastatingly beautiful.

He has waited a long time. And maybe like how he knew what to name his dog, he knows that he’s got to make the choice.

If there’s a chance to be happy.

“Physician, heal thyself,” he whispers.

Eggsy quirks a brow. “What was that?”

In response, he slowly takes a step forward until he is nearly breathing in Eggsy’s air. Eggsy sucks in a sharp breath and holding it, not daring to move.

When he meets Harry’s gaze, confusion and hope shining in eyes that are as verdant as summer, Harry learns forward in increments, slowly, until their lips barely brush against each other, light as a breeze.

Eggsy’s exhales, breath hot on his skin, nearly unable to hold his gaze so close like this, so his eyes flutter closed instead as Harry leans forward and presses his lips to his again, this time properly for several seconds or minutes maybe, before pulling back just enough to pull him into focus.

“You don’t…” Eggsy breathes shakily. “You don’t have to. I really would be happy just being friends. Just being near you. It would be enough.”

“I know,” he says. “But this is what I want, and I’m tired of not allowing myself to have it.”

When he pitches forward again, this time he finds himself with an armful of Eggsy, who presses in close, sliding his own arms over his shoulders to draw him closer still, and when Harry coaxes him, he opens his mouth to Harry’s questing tongue licking against the soft roof of his mouth.

Somewhere, Mr Pickle drops the reclaimed ball at his feet and nudges his ankle, yipping when Harry doesn’t respond. The insects creak and chirp in the fading dusk and the sky darkens. The lights from the nearby houses start to turn on.

His first instinct is to try and memorise this moment, soak it in and hoard the exact feeling of it away for a future, darker time when he will have lost it all, but for once, he simply lets it go. He has to trust that there will be more in times to come, as easy and wonderful as this, and even if there aren’t, well, it’s as Roxy says: he’s had more than most.

“Can I take you out to dinner?” Eggsy asks when they finally part for air. “For real this time? And if it goes well, perhaps dinner after that? And more, still, after that? Can we pick up that thread?”

“Yes,” he says with absolute clarity, swiping his thumb over the plush cushion of Eggsy’s kiss-swollen lip, watching the joyful spark light up his eyes. “Yes, and I’m very much looking forward to it.”


End file.
